Icarus
by Trinity Destler
Summary: (Post-Thor, Lokane) Having let go, Loki falls- literally and figuratively- to Earth. Meanwhile, Jane is still trying to get off the ground.
1. Burn

_Firmly movieverse, with characterisation based entirely on _Thor_. Not that I won't make allusions to stuff from myths/comics, but those are not the_ _characters I'm trying to write and I won't be crossing the streams. So to speak. (Side note, since it seems to be a point of contention, this does mean that I'm going to write Loki with blue eyes, as they were blue in the film__.) AU only in that it ignores _The Avengers _and the teaser for it from the credits.  
_

.

_"...how everything turns away quite leisurely from the disaster; _

_the ploughman may have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, _

_but for him it was not an important failure; _

_and the __expensive delicate ship that must have seen something amazing, _

_a boy falling out of the sky, _

_had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on."_

W.H. Auden

1. Burn

.

He had imagined it would be his last act of will in the waking Realms to slide sideways through the void which was real and the void between, then back again somewhere else entirely. This he only did so that he would not fall through the ruins of the Bifrost to Jotunheim. Not die there. He had nothing left to want, but he yet did _not _want and what he did not want was to suffer the knowledge that Odin's rescue, the whole course of his own life, had made no difference in the manner of his death.

And so he fell.

Time spun outward, he fell through the influence of many worlds: mortal years passed. His grief and rage cooled to a brittle agony. The hopelessness of his love for father, brother, mother, _home_, grew sharp-edged with certainty. At least that love would not be twisted further, would no longer fuel him forward in recklessness, for he saw now that it could not be mended any more than it could be destroyed. It was almost comforting to know that there had never been anything for him, that he was not passed over as he had so long thought; the injustice of which had so long been working to bring his once-temperate blood to the most violent of boils.

His pain had been in how far his reach exceeded his grasp. Being nothing, he'd deserved nothing. They had done only harm in giving him any more.

He regretted.

He longed for death and there an end.

He was safe from Valhalla, from meeting his family again over feasting and wine at some distant future date beneath those gleaming halls, his last gasps too dishonoured by cowardice to allow him entry. He would never see them again. And though he was yet very, very young among his people- both his peoples- he felt impossibly ancient under the heavy memory of his last moments with his mother. Her fierce, lovely face white with horror as she watched him cast out his brother with their father's spear.

The spear of kingship which was rightfully his, which he equally rightfully should never have been permitted to touch. The brother who would have _should have_ destroyed him before he could e'er set foot in Asgard if he had known the truth, the brother whose love cut more deeply than his hate.

He regretted.

Was it the unknowing attempt to be one of them, not realising his nature must be fought, that had lead him to this? Without knowing his strange interests and unwarrior-like disposition portended more than just an unfashionable, atypical, disappointment of a prince. Was it their suppression of the monster- teaching it to think itself a man, letting it believe itself worthy of that fraternity which naturally would not come- that had turned his mind? Or was it only the infinitely futile desire to be the equal of shining Thor?

He knew it was not precisely the original attempt to be what he was not born to be which had consumed him, which had torn worlds; that had only set him high on a precipice, his balance uncertain and the path treacherous. It was the more earnest, desperate, second effort to be what he truly _was not_ which had caused him to fall. Cracks in his patch-work identity had shown throughout his life, but it was in his last violent lunge to be the heir he thought was wanted, his mad scrambling to follow in his father's and his brother's footsteps and therefore prove he also was a worthy son, that horrors had spilled out. The abandonment of his own temperament to pursue an ideal he could never reach.

If he had not tried to be as great a prince as his brother, if he had been content to suit better with lesser company and to never overstep his inglorious talents, might he have lived happily? Might he have never learned the terrible truth of his unbelonging? Had not there been times when he accomplished feats of unquestionable value with the capacities his brethren scorned, when he was called temperate by his father and it was not the insult but the virtue that was meant? Contentment could come from such things, if one was willing to be satisfied by them. If one abandoned one's ambitions for equality, forgot _but both of you were born to be kings_.

Second prince of Asgard for all of his life. Could blood be so much stronger than culture? It was not even whispered, but spoken loudly that the blood of Odin once ran thick with that of giants. Whether such a thing could be believed and what it should mean if it were was not a question his generation had devoted any time to pondering. Enemy was enemy and this enemy was monstrous.

_'Not for nothing is he called Allfather. All's-Father he is.'_

_'But he is _my_ father.'_

_'That is different, Your Highness. There are many sonships. There is blood, there is fealty, there is magic. You are all.'_

_'Only me. He's my father.'_

_'And your brother's, Your Highness. Firstborn.'_

_'I hate that word.'_

_'Because it is not for you. But you must not be greedy, my prince. Wisdom is not selfish.'_

Lessons not listened to, lies not unlearned.

Odin so-called Allfather had said nothing in Loki's lifetime to contradict what all clearly knew about the barbarity of the Jotun. Odin who spoke of peace and joining only when it was beyond reach, when his pet changeling slipped his leash and discovered that he only lived to be a hidden trump card, in case the giants ever tried to crawl from beneath Asgard's boot. As if Odin would have ever willingly tarnished the Eternal Realm by wedding it with that of monsters.

_Mother knew and still she knelt to him and called him King and Son and family._

_Queen Frigga the Soft-heart, who held a wolf to her breast and called it a lamb._

_So much I understand now, so much I never will._

But was he doomed in birth or was he merely broken? Did the poison of his strangeness come from the womb and seed from which he sprang- how could it be said to if Odin himself were likewise tainted- and was his upbringing just, or generous, or as unfair as he had once imagined? If he asked the Norns, would they say it was all in his own hands and he could have walked differently? Could anyone walk another path than they had once chosen?

Could Thor have grown to be a worthy king when he felt the weight of the crown bear down upon his heart? If Loki had not interfered to preserve the realm and gratify his jealousies, would his brother have proven even half as intrinsically worthy as banishment forced him to become?

_'No murder is justified, my son. War can be. Conflate them not.'_

He saw now his own childishness, as great as Thor's, and wondered if he could have helped it if he had turned inward the same discernment he trained so long on his brother. The crushing, ugly honesty that his envy and resentment had saved for Thor alone- was any man able to see himself so clearly?

Even with the worst poison of his madness washed out by resignation and understanding and terrible new self-awareness, he still could not fathom its ultimate source.

_Am __I __a __monster __or __not_ _? _

If not by blood, then by action against that blood. If by blood, then action was irrelevant.

_I only tried to finish his work for him, accomplish his final glory. I only endeavoured to belong to him. I only thought...  
_

_I don't want it to be my fault.  
_

But would it not be worse to think he had no soul at all?

_At least I would have chosen. Is choosing so wrongly better than no choice? _

_Which truly makes a monster?_

_ **.,.,.,.,.,.,.,**  
_

His whole being was afire with unspeakable pain. Pain from outside of his mind for the first time in some several eternities. He was entering a heaven, hurtling towards a firmament: soon it would be finished.

Dead and punishèd, and no one had needed to do it. His unwise passions burned up, his placeless existence extinguished, his sins remembered the only burden that would be left to those who had claimed to love him.

He could not regret that.

**.,.,.,.,.,.,.,**

He lay, unmoving in the crater where he had fallen for three days and three nights. Snow drifted over him, the warmth of his own breath forming icy clouds which filled his vision and obscured the dark vista of unfamiliar stars. For three days and three nights he was still and thought of nothing and marvelled at his body's gross failure to break when his heart and his mind had given so easily. An irony for he who had thought his mind so much greater than his might.

At last, he was forced to accept that he had gone on living in spite of his every readiness to die.

And so he rose.


	2. Salve

2. Salve

.

It had been almost a year since her sojourn among the gods.

Jane had never really believed that her life could be radically altered by a brief meet-cute and a whirlwind adventure of hijinks and heroism- she had never thought much of that kind of romantic comedy, to be perfectly honest- but here she was, living a life forever changed because some guy had accidentally stumbled into it. For three days.

Of course, he was a superhuman, possibly immortal, technically alien guy and they hadn't fallen into true love forever or run towards each other across an airport after a last minute epiphany or anything.

So there was that.

Not that she could have held it against herself too much if she had fallen hard for Thor, even in three days. He was pretty much a literal knight in shining armour with the manners to match. He was the human (or Asgardian, rather) avatar of her dreams about the endless possibilities of the unexplored universe, and his very presence was proof to the correctness of her theories. He had a huge home team advantage. Without even getting into the whole blond Adonis with sparkly, summer-sky-blue eyes part.

But she was a grown woman and getting super giggly and really liking the guy were not love and emotional outbursts fuelled by extreme circumstances were not a good basis for a lasting relationship. She had no expectations.

If she ever even saw him again. It was kind of a moot point.

She did have a lovely, charming memory of being swept off her feet and she'd probably never have to deal with the harsh reality that jocks with hero complexes were not her type, there were issues underlying most societies with chivalric codes, and that she and Thor were unimaginably unlikely to have anything in common after the wonder and giggles wore off.

This way, with a kiss goodbye and a promise he might not be able- but definitely _intended _to keep, the wonder didn't have to wear off.

It was honestly enough for her to know for a fact that her research was absolutely heading somewhere and somewhere worthwhile. Somewhere actually totally, ridiculously incredible. No one had that in her field. The certainty, the marvellous _certainty_, definitely provided a balm for the years of academic embarrassment, the alienation and frustration, the being called either a surprisingly young crackpot or a surprisingly old naïf.

Jane considered herself pretty grounded, really. Maybe she was a little impulsive, but her head was in the stars not the clouds.

Not that the research was going particularly amazingly well just at the moment. At least it was going on in a well-funded manner. At least Erik was with her and she wasn't entirely by herself staring at data until it blurred, kludging together equipement that only half worked, trying to get colleagues to substantiate her hunches without asking explicit questions, and beginning to wonder if anything was really out there or if the sleep deprivation and Darcy's coffee were finally rotting her mind.

She'd learned that a girl should not science in isolation for too long at a stretch, and she should definitely not then try to explain her totally valid and realistic theories of possible inter-dimensional, almost certainly intra-dimensional, wormhole travel to a poli-sci major who hates math.

It was probably silly of her to think so, but she suspected the decline in her progress might be traceable to Darcy's needing to go back to classes and normality in the city in a few days. The stimulating aggravation, growing fondness, and occasional stunning insight Darcy cheerfully provided was well worth the so-strong-it'll-roll-you coffee she made.

Jane might even miss her coffee, when it came to it.

A knock on her trailer's wall broke her stupor and she startled so violently that she smashed her hand into the cupboard at the edge of the tiny bed. Yes, this was about the size of her life lately. Getting sadder and more clumsy all the time.

"Yeah?" she called, shaking the injured hand and wincing to herself.

Darcy's muffled voice answered, "There's a guy here."

She stuck her head out the door, "Guy? What guy? One of those SHIELD guys?" Jane wanted nothing to do with any more SHIELD guys on her turf. She preferred they stick to the telephone and mailing her cheques. The cheques she was fine with. If nothing came of the project they were interested in, they still owed her for pain and suffering.

Darcy was popping her gum in her usual impossibly relaxed fashion, shaking her head no, "Umm, I don't think he's just a SHIELD guy. He's wearing what seriously has to be a trillion dollar suit and he's, like, unrealistically good-looking. I mean at the- I mean, he's not the same _type_, but he's at a Thor-like level. You should be open to variety, Jane, especially god-like variety. I don't know what he wants, but he can have it if he's asking me."

She grabbed hold of Jane's sweater and tugged her off the trailer steps, "Go check it out before he has to go back to the Hugo Boss walk-off or whatever."

.,.,.,.,.,

She smoothed her hair and shook the worst of the lumps and cereal crumbs out of her cardigan as she walked toward the lab. It was good to seem at least as professional as any given reclusive mad scientist from world cinema. He might be one of those eccentric billionaires she was convinced had to exist to be funding SHIELD's barrage of weirdness-detecting equipment. In which case, she should make a good impression and maybe cut out the middle man.

She saw him, silhouetted in the very centre of her odd little open-concept lab, and a shiver of nerves went through her. Why couldn't strangers in ominous dark suits call first and warn people they were coming? She told herself to get a grip and reached for the door-handle. He turned around to look at her as she came in.

Well, he was certainly striking. Very tall with long, lean limbs and perfect posture, he had an effortless natural poise that made him seem sort of stately. This was someone more used to giving orders than taking them, she'd bet, probably old money. The obviously expensive suit and full-length overcoat he wore were the kind of definitive black you rarely saw in fabric, a coal-edge black. Even his hair, all smoothed back from his face and combed practically to a point at the nape of his neck, was so black it was almost blue with the sun on it. The contrast made his skin look startlingly white and his large, grey-blue eyes seem almost colourless. Like mirrors.

He lacked the warm, inviting handsomeness she remembered in Thor, the quality of his beauty having instead a certain chilly severity to it, but Jane could still see why Darcy had drawn a comparison. Something in the degree of his charisma, something in how he held himself, also reminded her of their otherworldly house guest. Besides, as she took in the painfully sharp edges of his cheekbones and how the vaguely triangular slope of his archless eyebrows gave his neutral expression a melancholic cast, she decided he looked more vulnerable than aloof. A little fragile.

"Hi," she said, feeling impossibly awkward now that she'd had this thought about him. Men didn't appreciate that kind of sentiment generally.

"Hi," he repeated, tonguing the word too deliberately, like he'd never used it before. "Jane Foster?"

She flushed, feeling stupid for not introducing herself, "Um, yes. And you are?"

"Luke Wodenson, Dr. Foster. My apologies for the intrusion," he made to take her hand, but at entirely the wrong angle for a handshake. Seeming to catch himself off her expression, he just splayed his fingers in a kind of contrite wave and dropped his hand again, muttering, "Beg pardon," like he felt like the biggest idiot who had ever lived.

He sounded not a little like a Jane Austen mini-series. His accent might even be a bit more posh than Thor's had been, come to think of it. For a moment she felt an outrageous suspicion building, "Where are you from, if you don't mind me asking?"

"Swaziland," he said, with the air of a man who knew you wouldn't have a clue what he was talking about. "It's in Africa. Ex-British protectorate."

"Oh," she blinked. The suspicion passed. She was getting too spaced out lately. "I'm sorry, what did you want with me, exactly?"

"I read about you in _Les __é__toiles scientifique_. I'm something of an amateur astronomer, I'm afraid, and something rather more of a semi-casual student of quantum mechanics." This was all smooth as silk and his slightly shy smile was winsome as all get-out. He'd thought about this, rehearsed it maybe. She felt oddly floaty. "I think you have hit upon one of the dangling threads which can unravel the untold secrets of the universe, Dr. Foster. I would like to offer my services to you, in any capacity which you require assistance."

"Really."

He looked the tiniest bit thrown by her nonplussed reaction, uncertain of himself, "Yes."

"Do you have any formal qualifications?" She seriously had to be dreaming this.

"I attended Oxford University for almost two years."

"And you read?"

"Particle Physics."

Jane stared at him, not knowing what the hell to say, and wished he'd lean against something instead of standing so ram-rod straight. She was used to a lot of people being taller than her, but- especially this close together- he was not just tall, he was utterly towering. She was getting a crick in her neck from looking up at him. "Uh, come with me, would you? Just over here." She gestured him over to the kitchen table they had on the far side of the lab and towards a chair. Her plan had been to stand while he sat and get the high ground for a while, but he seemed to have no intention of sitting before she did. So she did, and he did: his legs so long that he had to cross them at the ankles camp fire-style to fit his knees under the table. For Pete's sake.

"Okay. Um, Luke. I'm just... no one ever takes my theories seriously. It does all sound kind of crazy when you say it out loud, even to me. Why are you here? Be totally honest."

He met her eyes and there was something in his expression that suggested to her that he didn't actually have an answer, but he glanced down and the fan of his eyelashes masked the clarity she'd just glimpsed.

"Miss Foster, your thoughts are almost utterly original, unparalleled in boldness. You are an intensely intriguing woman with a perhaps world-changing discovery in your grasp. I am a life-long hobbyist, I crave the novel. Do you begrudge me my instinct to seize upon the most potentially interesting opportunity I have ever come across?"

Jane frankly didn't know what to think. Was he trying to imply he was willing to give her crackpot ass the benefit of the doubt because he was being smothered in ennui and he had a crush on her brain? She'd think he was seriously nefarious, but she could taste the truth of what he was saying about chasing novelty. That part she unquestioningly believed. In addition to which, she might add, the last time she had impulsively trusted someone saying something crazy it had been completely true and everything had been pretty awesome. In the traditional sense of the word.

"Why didn't you finish Oxford?" she asked. Sensibly.

He ticked his chin to the side, his small mouth pursing in brief disdain, "I became bored."

How had she known he was going to say that.

"The span of my attention is very great when its object is worthwhile," he added, borderline defensively.

She smiled at him, mildly charmed by his apparent insecurity in spite of his fancy clothes and his posturing. "Luke, here's the thing, some kinda heavy stuff is at stake in my work and there are interested parties who worry I might not be crazy. I kind of need to know that I can trust the people around me. And here's you, a rich, super-smart anonymous guy with no day job in the way who just wants to help. I mean, should I be reporting someone for poorly-planned attempted scientific espionage?"

He stared at her, his lips in a tight, unhappy line. "I could acquire a 'day job', if it would make you more comfortable."

"Where does your money come from?" she blushed at her own bluntness and played with her hair as she avoided his eyes, "I know that's a super rude question, but I'm serious. I sort of have to ask. You seem more than a little too good to be true. I'm losing my grad student this week and everything would be so much more convenient if there were someone..."

His upraised hand drove all words from her mouth. He seemed to take her obedience for granted, because he was already talking, "To answer your question, Miss Foster, I am independently wealthy. It is not obscene, but my parents left me an adequate living. They were killed. At home. In Africa."

Jane bit her lip. She should ask for proof of some kind, but either he was a brilliant actor or there was real pain in his voice. And he was obviously trying to cover it, veins stood out on his elegant hands as his fingers clenched around the word 'killed'.

"I'm sorry."

He gave a weak smile, looking at the floor, "As am I, Miss Foster."

She should at least ask him how they died, but she knew she wasn't going to. "Please call me Jane."

"Jane," he said, surprising her. She would have thought he was the type to whom the invitation would have made no difference. He seemed so formal, so tightly laced. So _ill at ease_.

Then again, he had stopped calling her 'doctor' when he started complimenting her.

"And now you... what? Sit around reading scientific journals and hoping for something amazingly interesting to fall into your lap?"

"Something like that," he grinned at her suddenly and it made his eyes spark in a way she wasn't entirely sure that she liked. "I wouldn't say I sat around. More interesting things tend to happen when you make them happen, don't they Jane?"

The impulse to ask him what he would know about it was strong- but he didn't know anything, even if he was a science spy and thought he did. Unless he worked for SHIELD after all. No one else in the world could possibly know anything.

"Did I not read in your author blurb that you once caused three hundred thousand dollars worth of damages to your undergraduate biochem laboratory because you ignored the express precautions of an experiment in order to 'see what would happen'?" he twinkled at her, and this she liked.

"The damage wasn't that bad."

His close-mouthed smile gave him ridiculously endearing dimples and she found herself wondering how old he was. She couldn't begin to guess and would have believed anything from twenty-two to thirty-five.

"It's the truth!" she protested against the knowingness of the smile, "My professor exaggerated so the school would give him more money than the repairs cost and he could get better equipment than the junk he was replacing."

Luke nodded diplomatically, "Admirable motivation whilst having one's sport, I'm sure."

"Let him have it. It's not like _that's_ the thing that's ruining my reputation."

He reached across the table and covered her little hand with his much larger one. The slight touches of his slender fingers were cool against her skin and tingled alarmingly. He leaned forward and her attention shot back to his face, his pale eyes, "Let me help you, Jane. Whatsoever I lack in patience and formal education, I promise you I make it up with cleverness. Keenness."

"And modesty?" she wanted to kick herself for throwing out that mouldy old chestnut.

"It is my one gift and I am certain of it. As I am certain of you. I believe in you, Jane. That is the truth."

Damn it, this was too weird for tact. "Why are you so desperate to be involved?"

His mouth opened but he paused and shut it again, his fine brows knit with consternation as he studied her. A time passed, then he sighed through the fingers of the free hand which had come up to cover his mouth, his index finger worrying his bottom lip, "Alas- in very painful honesty indeed, Miss Foster- I have nothing else to do in all the world."

"Jane," she said again, feeling vindicated.

"Jane."


	3. Consultation

3. Consultation

.

Darcy still thought it was a fantastic development, the interference of perfect serendipity rescuing Jane from the oncoming tragic loneliness of a life without Darcy in it. She conceded that Luke was very mysterious and that there was very definitely something strange about him, that he had also arrived with somewhat suspiciously convenient timing, but she thought these were relatively minor points. In light of her departure and Jane's ensuing sadness, there had to be priorities.

"Jane, you once made out with a Norse god of thunder. How normal can your life really be, after that? I think you're marked for all time. Touched by Vorlons."

Jane turned a corner and shot Darcy a look as her signal clicked off, "Whatever that means."

"Didn't we have this conversation last time?" Erik was pretty mad about what he saw as history repeating; in his own quiet, white-lipped, Erik way. Days into the argument, he was just getting madder. "Do we remember what happened then?"

Darcy hummed in thought and shook her head, "I thought that turned out pretty awesomely except for SHIELD managing to lose my iPod and nothing else, then trying to tell me it wasn't on purpose. Coulson smirks when he lies. I almost punched him."

"It did not turn out 'awesomely', Darcy," Erik was not budging from the topic at hand, "and the fact that it didn't turn out a lot worse is not because it wasn't a terrible idea."

"Which part?" Jane threw in, not meeting his eyes in the rear-view mirror even though she could feel the reflected heat of his glare.

She did catch a glimpse of his deep frown and the thundercloud brewing on his brow, "Everything after I told you to stay away from that guy and you didn't. Maybe some of the stuff before that."

Jane huffed. Thor had turned out to be noble and heroic and nice as all hell, not to mention telling the truth and not at all crazy. So Erik was still completely wrong even if she probably should have listened to him. Her instincts must be pretty decent, because what were the odds? "It's because of that terrible idea that we all still have jobs. And funding. And any hope of this research ever seeing the light of day and being something other than a laughingstock when it does," was all she said.

"Don't tell him the truth." Erik was using his most serious of serious faces.

"Not right away," Darcy agreed.

Erik clutched his brow, "Darcy-"

Her hand went up in the universal sign language for 'ain't listening', "If she's gonna fall for him, she can't be lying to him the whole time about something this big. Eventually it will come out, probably because Thor shows up randomly the day before their wedding and thinks he's still in like Flynn. It'll be drama-city and betrayal and angst. Jane will be all devastated. Great big huge mess."

"Darcy!"

"Don't look at me like you're not going to fall for him! You've been moping over Thor and hiding from everything fun for months and you're bored to death. You're barely even working any more. This guy was sculpted out of rainbows and bunnies and smarts and sex by your fairy godmother to be both exactly your perfect type and exactly what you practically need right now for your way important science stuff. The universe has clearly aligned itself specially just to get you out of this funk, and no one should fight the universe, Jane."

There were no words.

Apparently of the opinion that they just weren't getting it, she reiterated, "The Thor thing would never have worked out long-term, you're hung up because you totally know that and it bums you out, and suddenly his staggeringly hot exact opposite wanders into your life begging you to talk science to him? Hello? That is not a coincidence."

"Darcy, if you don't stop talking, I will plug the hole." Jane knew her cheeks were even redder than Darcy's lipstick and stared determinedly at the road ahead.

"I'm gonna miss you guys." Darcy smiled beatifically at them both, her eyes shiny with feeling. "Bros for life."

They were almost at the bus station, too. Jane was not going to cry. She was not losing her lovably grating, hilariously practical assistant because Darcy would torture her again the following summer. This was just a hiatus until their further adventures.

"For life," she said, totally not crying. She could hear Erik sighing heavily in the back.

.,.,.,.,.,.

When she pulled up to the lab after dropping Erik outside the dingy basement flat a local had been nice enough to rent him, it was only just lunchtime and she was planning on a little vacation for herself and some Ben & Jerry's. She needed the comfort and probably the calories, as she seemed to be worrying herself out of her favourite jeans. It was just possible that man was not designed to run on coffee alone. Maybe Darcy was right about this funk she wasn't in. Maybe it was getting kind of bad. It was true about the work, she was barely pulling eight hour days any more. It wasn't like her.

As she got out of the van, however, she immediately knew that her afternoon would not be as uneventful as she had planned.

Luke sat on the concrete lip of the overgrown planter out front, his elbows resting on his parted knees and his hands clasped between them. His head came up as she approached and he squinted at her against the desert sun. She guessed it was in concession to the heat that his full-length overcoat was off and folded neatly beside him, but he still wore a black wool suit and he didn't look as though he felt one bit discomfited by the soaring temperature or the glaring sun. She thought the shivery material of his shirt must be actual silk, a terrifically clingy fabric in the presence of moisture, but it floated as diaphanously over his broad shoulders and slim chest as if he were a boutique mannequin rather than flesh and blood. Some people must have fewer sweat glands. Or none. It was the only answer. Darcy usually looked annoyingly fresh in the desert, too. Not that Darcy wore _silk and wool_. There madness lay.

"Jane Foster," he smiled slightly as she reached him, "It occurred to me that at our first meeting I said I would await your word, but I gave you no means by which to send it. I hope I haven't disrupted you in your duties?"

It took a second to parse what he'd said, then she waved away the polite concern, "Not at all. I'm kind of taking the day off. Wanna come in?"

Now was that smart, Jane? The mysterious dude just shows up again and you invite him in knowing that you're all by yourself and no one will be coming to check on you until at least tomorrow? Jane. We've got to fix this decision making, Jane. Erik would have an utter cow if he knew.

"I would be most honoured," he said, bowing his head as he gestured her ahead of him to the door.

She set about unlocking it, but she was still busily regretting the instinctual, easy friendliness she was beginning to recognise was bound to get her into trouble one of these days. If it hadn't already. She was far too curious about this overly formal, overly smart, overly helpful weirdo to make a sensible decision and tell him to gather some credentials for a few months, then maybe they'd talk. Like she'd been far too curious about unexpected stellar phenomena and what a person-shaped shadow was doing inside of it, about that person himself. Just because that hadn't ended badly, she found herself repeating Erik's mantra, didn't mean she could keep her messed up priorities.

Curiosity, the cat, etc.

He did look so forlorn, though, when she caught him out of the corner of her eye. Forlorn and tense. She wanted to know why he apparently didn't have anything else to do, why this was important to him the way it had only previously been important to her. What did he see in the project? Was it what she saw?

It wasn't like she didn't realise he was hiding something. She'd just keep an eye on him. She really needed someone new to talk to who was close enough to her level that they could point things out that her months of intense focus had blurred beyond seeing. Fresh eyes without too many preconceptions.

Jane went about turning on the lights and the kitchen fan, aware of Luke somewhere behind her. He had a way of lurking just on the edge of her vision that was mildly disconcerting. He was a large presence, figuratively as well as physically, but his personal magnetism seemed slightly off. His graceful, dramatic figure and intense, measuring gaze drew attention, but his closed body language and forebodingly chilly air also repelled it; so you looked at him but your eyes slid away quickly. He was like a lone grey cloud at the edge of a perfect blue sky.

Now she felt uncharitable.

"Would you like some tea?" Jane could not make coffee. She'd flooded the counter three times and then Darcy had said she wasn't allowed to touch the machine again until she'd been to see someone about the Voodoo curse under which she was obviously living.

Startled from his examination of the Energizer Bunny wind-up toy he'd found on her desk, he stared at her a moment, "Beg pardon? Tea?"

"I've got regular or some herbal kinds without caffeine. Fruit and mint and things."

He looked almost annoyed, but his tone was unfailingly polite, "I will take what I am given."

Well. That was a pretty winning attitude in an assistant, she had to say.

Finally settling them at the table with steaming mugs and some crackers she'd dug up, she looked over at her strange caller. He smiled mysteriously and she was waffling again about whether it was a good idea to keep letting strangers into her lab. She was like a crazy cat lady, adopting the town strays. Except both of her strays were tall, handsome men who gave off- in different flavours- the air of being Totally Able to Take Care of Themselves. Still, somehow, she felt a certain responsibility. Much less so for Luke than Thor, obviously, but she had a similar feeling that he might not be Okay Out There if she didn't help him find his feet. At least she hadn't hit him with the van yet.

"Have you considered my proposal, Jane Foster?" Luke was asking, giving her what he probably imagined was a pleasantly curious look over the top of his tea cup but which seemed to her more like a cat who knew you had bacon on your plate but who was too proud to beg.

She decided to stall. "What did you have in mind? For you to do, I mean. For me."

"Whatever duty you require of me, I should be pleased to perform, Jane. I am prepared to follow you most slavishly. However, I think it would be in our mutual best interest for me to help you direct your research at its most fundamental levels into avenues you may not have considered. The new interpretation of basic concepts and their application in light of your theory, which would change in cascade all previous exegesis of observed data. I have tremendous imagination, Jane. A quality which, perhaps, has been lacking?" He spread his hands on the table and she eyed the outward splay of his long fingers, like a spider's web against the linoleum. "Your ambition and desire have driven you to great insight and given you the purpose to pursue it, but perhaps you are still tethered overmuch to the Earth? To a certain 'way'. Is that so?"

After a moment he raised his eyebrows and she realised it was an actual question he was expecting her to answer.

"Maybe," she hedged, not given to self-reflection. She wasn't particularly offended by the idea that she wasn't radical _enough_, either because it might be a bit ass-backwardly true or because she'd spent so much time trying to defend herself as not being very radical at all if you'd just give her a chance please listen it's not like I'm saying there are Atlantians among us- fine! I'll take this to a competing journal!

There was no point in getting pissed off until she'd established whether Luke's supposition had any validity.

However, he didn't know that she hadn't just made the leap to believing in the viability of the Einstein-Rosen Bridge as a theoretical concept, she'd also been quick to the idea that the bridge could actually lead Somewhere Else and that Someone could come across it. That took kind of a lot of imagination for a scientist raised in her academic climate, or really any academic climate. Well, it took courage anyway. The dogma of limited rationalism still haunted her quite often. It was occasionally an effort to remember that she wasn't crazy and openness to the unexpected was what science was all about.

It didn't stop it stinging that she was technically a True Believer and might need to rethink her stance on alien abduction stories.

She had empiric evidence, of course, but habitual trains of thought died hard. And she didn't like to think of Thor as 'an alien', _per se_, even though it had to be conceded. She'd made out with an alien.

"I think I've got a lot of imagination," she said. "But I could definitely use a different way of looking at things."

"You have laboured almost alone for a long time."

Jane nodded. Glancing out the glass walls to the horizon, she quietly added, "Not the best way to work."

There was a silence.

He stared down at his hands in his lap for a long moment, his right thumb rubbing over his index finger anxiously, his angular face slightly pinched. "You are thinking of accepting me, then?"

"I'm thinking of it."

His eyes were huge with some subtle emotion when he looked up, turned an icy pure blue by the sunlight hitting them, "My mother once told me that instinct is born perfect, until the habits of deliberation learned by the childish mind corrupt it. In maturity, we seek only to hear again the truth of will our upbringing has tainted. I see very little corruption in you."

Jane didn't know what to say for a second. "Are you telling me to follow my heart?"

Luke seemed a bit amused, though his tone remained serious, "I am suggesting that your first impulse, whatever it may have been, was likely the correct course. Because I suspect you have never taught your impulses to be wrong. A young child knows what it wants. An adolescent thinks he does and is mistaken. A man is never certain."

"First I have no imagination and now I'm immature? You're not making friends here."

He didn't rise to it, merely smiling coyly at her.

"You're pretty weird, do you know that?"

He looked pained, "I have learned it, yes. It is not something I expect to be able to correct."

She had to laugh and he eyed her warily. "Stop trying," she said sincerely. "Weird is good."

"I shall endeavour to accept it- under your tutelage?" he added, hopefully.

He was right, though. She'd never spent enough time second guessing herself to get a complex into her instincts. She was a damn the torpedoes kind of girl. Always had been. That was the whole reason she was here in the middle of nowhere working on something mad that had turned into something impossible which had turned into this ridiculous meeting. Everything in her life was way too far left of normal for her to ever start being sensible.

"Sure," she said, shrugging. "When do you start?"

After all, she found herself rationalising, if it all went screaming to hell and he was some kind of spy or crazy person, she could totally count on SHIELD sticking its nose in to rescue her. That was perhaps the one upside to having a shady government agency interesting itself too much in your research.


	4. Ache

4. Ache

.

The compromise with Erik and her own, admittedly underdeveloped, sense of caution involved not reading Luke in on very much of the project and feeling out his responses to it a little bit at a time before they committed to letting him help with current problems or new data gathering. The research being at something of an impasse anyway, it felt nice to go back over the progress she'd made before Norsemen started raining from the sky.

It also felt pretty safe to show Luke the old data from the stellar events she'd observed which had not yet taken a turn for the legendary, but it was difficult to hold back once she had. He took everything in so quickly in their first brief meetings, his questions weird or basic but very few and his understanding much deeper than she could have anticipated from an amateur. He seemed to struggle with terminology and some calculations, but never with concepts or applications, including applications she hadn't fathomed.

Within a week, the meetings were getting longer and there were things_ he_ was explaining to_ her_. He seemed to hate showing his work in full, quickly growing impatient with the process of laying foundations or supporting his intuitive leaps. There were rudimentary mathematical symbols he didn't even seem to know, but he doodled illustratively as he spoke to her in figurative rather than technical language and she eventually found his meanings reasonably clear. Usually his left hand would sketch diagrams and orbitals on the whiteboard while his right would flail in gestures or add notations, sometimes it was the other way around. She found his unthinkingly ambidextrous manual dexterity less interesting than the oddly narrow, spiky, slant-less printing it produced, and that less interesting than what he was trying to communicate with it.

She wondered how someone could so fully grasp the implications of incredibly complex abstract theorems about the nature of matter, but have no idea of entry-level expressions of physical laws. Basic formulae mystified him, but with the variables plugged in he was faster than a calculator.

When they started arguing about whether the theoretical Einstein-Rosen bridge would be like a tunnel through space-time made of same-universe matter differing only in type rather than kind (a 'short cut', as Jane derisively called it when he started defending the theory) or a doorway to a legitimately alternate, smaller dimension and back out again, he began at last to come unwound from the tightly controlled coil of formality he'd been in since their first meeting.

"There is_ one_ world to live in, if one speaks of 'the world' as all interconnected cosmic reality. There are ways through it, where it is possible to walk between the position and the thrust of a single electron, but-"

"The Uncertainty Principle as a basis for faster-than-light travel through wormholes?" Her incredulous tone was cutting, "That's word salad, Luke."

"Do not interrupt me," his voice was shockingly deep when he was annoyed. It got closer and closer to a straight up growl the more he lost his patience with her. It was not something she would have expected from such a slight and, frankly, pretty man who oozed urbane sophistication, and the incongruity was in danger of making her laugh. Not that it wasn't also quite successfully intimidating, especially the way he would bore into her with his narrow-eyed glare as he grumbled at her, nigh-on menacingly. He had real personal intensity. Super intensity, even. Not for the first time, she felt a tension ache building across her shoulders just from being in the same room with his unyielding focus.

He tossed his blazer over the back of a chair and rolled up his shirtsleeves primly as he extrapolated on her wrongness about many worlds and string theory, getting awkwardly close and talking in a low pitched yelling-whisper. Jane suppressed the urge to giggle inappropriately in her discomfort, but she was used to fighting about science with scarier people than he and was unwilling to stop him before he got where he was going. He was half into the broad consequences of causal efficacy in the conscious mind before he realised he was drifting too far from her area of expertise for her to properly appreciate the point he was trying to make.

Then he'd looked borderline sheepish. The day was stupidly hot and the lab didn't have proper air conditioning, but the heat had never yet seemed to touch him and she was sure it had nothing to do with the blotchy flush rising on his cheeks and down his milk-pale forearms.

They retreated to opposite sides of the lab to read, she going through her notes, he poring over some textbook. The silence stretched until it felt unbreakable and Jane sprawled across her desk, deciding she might as well be comfortable if he wasn't going to get over himself enough to continue the conversation. Or apologise again. He apologised to her a lot, always with this wary look in his eye like he was afraid he'd be left destitute in the science-less cold if she minded anything. This was the first time she'd managed a proper rise out of him. Not that she had been trying.

When she next looked up it was already evening. She stretched and glanced over to find him still propped up over a book, precariously perched cross-legged on his chair and only very slightly rumpled. His mercilessly scraped back hair had begun to lift away from his neck in rebellious half-curls, gaining fluff and body as it escaped from whatever product had ironed it down to his scalp. When he pushed a hand through it, it fell long around his face and an errant wave slid across his high, imperious forehead. He looked _so_ young and so vulnerable that it gave her real pause.

So much so that she interrupted his obvious concentration to blithely ask him how old he was. Jane had previously decided to allow him his sulk because it really didn't bother her one whit to go back to her notes for a while, but she didn't see the sense in going out of her way to indulge his delusion that she was sulking too when she wanted to talk.

Nothing personal at all had passed between them in the week she'd been letting him hang out in her lab and the abrupt question apparently stunned him even though he presumably remembered their first two conversations. He gaped at her.

"What?"

She was going to say something pithy about worrying she was robbing the cradle, but that phrase had way too many connotations she had no desire to raise. "I just..."

"I don't know," he snapped, scowling at her from beneath furrowed eyebrows. "Why?"

Now Jane was gob-smacked, "What do you mean you don't know?"

His eyes flicked back to the book, then roamed around the room, "At home, where we lived, we didn't keep close track of the years as you do; the anniversary of one's birth was not noted, nor would the precise moment even be known. Time was portioned differently, no calendar was kept but the fields and the stars." Picking up a pen, he started spinning it between his fingers so quickly that it became a blur. "I could get the approximate year from my papers- if it is significant?"

"No, it... no." She folded her arms and leaned on the desk in front of her, trying to work him out. He'd seriously never given her the answer she was expecting to any question since he bragged that formal education bored him. "Were your parents from there or...?"

"Yes, they-" he paused and glared out the window into the dwindling late-summer twilight. "I was..."

Jane didn't know whether to prompt him or not. She wasn't sure if he'd welcome interruption or if he'd explode. She didn't want to deal with an explosion. She really could use his help around here and she preferred to avoid the scenario where she kicked him out of the lab for thinking he could walk over her just because he was upset. If he was upset.

"It does not matter." He sighed, slumping slightly, and it looked as though there were the weight of ages dragging down his shoulders.

Jane felt curiosity making suicidal plans for her again. "It sounds to me like maybe it does."

The glare turned toward her and for a moment she knew real fear of him, but it passed almost immediately as he looked down in mixed shame and sadness. Now she was even more invested than before: needing to know, to understand, and her reckless sympathy running rampant._ I have no sense of self-preservation at all. I really do need a babysitter. This person could be anyone and I'm poking him with sticks to see if he'll bite._

"It..." Luke began, irritably flicking the pen away; at which point it sailed across the room and buried itself in the drywall up to the cap.

"Wow."

"I do apologise, Miss Foster!" he leapt up, his long-fingered hands fluttering in embarrassment. "I didn't intend to let- I didn't anticipate the flimsy-"

"Hey now. This is my lab you're talking about."

"Ah-"

Jane had to laugh at the stricken look on his face, but she was feeling less conviction in her decision that he probably wasn't a SHIELD agent. The scientific espionage theory would be looking a lot more plausible, except that she'd been talking science with him for a week and he obviously wasn't a PhD trying to dumb himself down. More like a prodigy trying to catch up. She remembered his speech about imagination and being tied to the earth and thought this was exactly the thing he was talking about. His lack of indoctrination into How Things Were meant he fearlessly said things that seemed ludicrous, then went on to explain them to her in a way that made compelling sense.

As long as she ignored ten years of education and went on pure instinct.

As long as she filled in his gesticulations with the first principles he apparently understood but didn't know how to communicate.

"Come clean with me, Luke," she found herself saying, gathering her fly-away hair into a messy bun, "were you raised in a secret ninja village?"

His nose wrinkled and that annoyed look was back. "I am not a 'ninja'."

Putting two and two together, Jane had the dawning thought that his little pained-annoyed looks meant he was confused and so unused to it, it pissed him off. She bit her lip to keep from laughing again. "Okay."

"You call me strange, Jane Foster, but you are hardly straightforward yourself."

She shook her head, "Straightforward is totally what I am. Normal, I don't know. But what you see is kinda what you get."

He nodded. "Yes, as I begin to discover. Why did you ask me about my parents?"

"I just wondered how far the culture went back or if it was something unique to you in your family. I like to know things, I always want to understand, and sometimes I don't think about, you know, manners before I start blurting all my questions out. I'm sorry." She yanked her hand down before she managed to worry her hair free of the bun she'd just put it in.

Unfazed by her wall of verbiage, Luke leaned on the edge of her desk. "It is all right. Your curious nature is your greatest asset, is it not? My biological mother was a British citizen and a kind of diplomat. She died when I was yet in my minority and I was adopted by the mother of a headman, a prominent woman in Swazi society. I am not certain why she took me in, my inheritance could not be accessed until I presented myself in Britain; whatever her plans for the future once were, I imagine I've thwarted them with my failure to return. You will have guessed already the winding path taken by my education across villages and nations. So you see, I am a culture of one."

"Doesn't that get lonely?" It was out before she could stop it, her interest surpassing her judgement as always.

He smiled wanly and he didn't look young any more. "I suppose that it must."

"If we somehow forced open an Einstein-Rosen bridge below the atmosphere, would you try to cross it? Is that why you're here?"

Luke ran his hand through his hair again, only provoking it into further curls and greater mess, "Jane, I confess to you that..."

"Yes?"

He turned his back to her and sighed, "I don't know."

Jane studied that back, not missing how stiffly the muscles were drawn taut beneath the delicate material of his shirt. "You don't know if you would try the bridge or you don't know why you're here?"

Luke's trapezius twitched and she knew he wasn't expecting her to pick at his response. Fair enough, she hadn't really pushed him before when he got all quiet and sincere-sounding. It was time to start, she figured.

"They are the same question."

"But you think it can be done, that's what you're getting at when you're trying to tell me about how you think consciousness as a real causal agent relates to quantum mechanics? You have an idea of how to control it, to make it happen."

"Currently there is the problem of it requiring more energy than it is possible for this entire planet to produce by any known method and how to calculate one's destination with continuous accuracy without a fleet of supercomputers carried along for the trip, but yes. You are entitled to your scepticism, Jane, but my method is sound. The uncertainty does your work for you like this: The bridge both exists and does not exist. The space between your starting point and your destination both exits and does not exist. This is how you travel it. You cross the space in a minute fraction of the time it actually takes because you are not traversing the space. Even as you are.

"One may walk in the footsteps of uncertainty, precisely because there is one world with many dimensions and not many worlds of one dimension each." He stared at her in utter stillness, looking like Michaelangelo's statue of the pagan god of thoughtful seriousness. Then his mouth quirked up on one side, "I postulate."

He sounded more sure than a postulation warranted, the light of sharing wonder in his eyes.

"Why didn't you just tell me you were bringing in a working theory?" Jane was not going to tell him he was really talking more about the quantum observer effect and folds in space-time than technically the uncertainty principle, because it was her fault for using the wrong term earlier (since it didn't seem likely he had known them... probably) and most people made that conflation anyway. You gotta pick your battles, and she had no aching desire to die on the hill of pedantry.

Luke chewed the inside of his lip as he worried his thumb (she marked that this seemed to be his most consistent nervous habit for future reference), "I was apprehensive."

"This is about you supposedly having nowhere else to be again, isn't it? Like, I turn you away and somehow you've got nothing to live for and no one else you could possibly talk to." Jane was impatient now with this idea, increasingly she couldn't see herself buying it no matter how well he was selling and he'd successfully derailed her with it a time too many. She gave people the benefit of the doubt to the point of handicap sometimes and it had to stop here before someone really took advantage.

But the stark lines of his thin-fleshed face made it impossible for her to miss the way he subtly grit his teeth at her dismissal of what she remembered he'd called 'painful honesty, indeed' and her heart actually sank. _Jane, you jerk, I think he really believes it. What could possibly be your story, you strange, prickly man._

"Well," Luke's high class accent was extra crisp, a knife-edge of politeness, "whether there is anyone else who would understand or not, are you yourself interested in my thoughts or have I been wasting your time? Dr Foster."

The silkiness of his deep voice as he added her official title reminded her of that scary moment earlier and she decided he was the kind of person who could hold a grudge until the heat death of the universe and not to let him labour under any misapprehensions if ever she could help it. "I'm sorry."

His disdain for that was obvious and he simply waited for an answer to his question without even bothering to dignify her apology with a dismissive gesture.

"You're not wasting anyone's time-"

"Good," he spun around and marched to the chair where he'd hung his blazer, rolling down his shirtsleeves and buttoning his cuffs. Jane had been about to tell him he was the most intuitively brilliant person she'd ever met and that she was incredibly grateful he'd come even if they never agreed on anything, but he didn't seem to want to hear her reassurances. She pretended not to be watching while he pretended he wasn't trying to smooth down his hair (it clung to his fingers and sprang up in tighter curls with every pass of his hand).

Pulling on his coat, he walked past her and paused at the door, "I will return in the morning to discuss the problem of power and calculations in the absence of probability, you may offer further critique then. I shall endeavour not to burden you with my personal state of affairs in future. I remind you that you did ask."

Yep, she knew it. She took off after him, catching the door before it shut and grabbing his arm. Slim though he was, it was like grabbing braided steel cable and her nerves fluttered a bit as she craned her head back to look him in the eye. "Really," she insisted, not wavering her gaze from those silvery blue-grey irises, "I made some assumptions and I'm sorry. I'd like to hear about your personal state of affairs whenever you feel comfortable telling me."

He glared down the length of his Grecian nose at her short fingers and chipped purple nail polish set against the impeccable black of his sleeve, "Release me, please."

She did, frowning at his distant tone. "I won't let you just be all icy polite from now on, you know. I can't stand on ceremony in my lab. I'll prank you if I have to."

Luke straightened his jacket and glanced her over speculatively, the intensity of his stern manner replaced by cocky amusement and a condescending smirk. "I should very much like to see you try. Good evening, Dr Foster."

Not quite forgiven, then. And a challenge issued.

Why did she get the feeling she was playing with fire?


	5. Remembrancer

5. Remembrancer

.

The first meeting she remembered- the one from which she counted the span of their friendship- took place in the twilight of her childhood, on the cusp of her adolescence. She had known more stars than they and this was obvious to her at once. Taller and sturdier than either prince, she had felt pride and disappointment almost equally. Pride that she was bigger and stronger than they were even though they were boys, and not just any boys but the princes of the Realm, disappointed that they were just children like she was and not some more exotic breed of life. Expectation of their majesty had grown to giant proportions in her mind as the importance of her presentation before them was explained to her.

Besides, Sif had heard many tales of Odin's doings and formed impressions of what a prince should be.

As she had been relentlessly drilled so to do by her mother and all the household maids, she completed the specific form of the warriors' obeisance that their station demanded. It was a kind of curtsey, halfway to the movement of taking one knee as one would do before the King, and the same clasp of hand to heart with the head down in reverence.

She bowed before Thor first, hearing her mother introduce her to the Queen as a worthy and comely companion to the first-born. Sif's young tongue was only mildly awkward on the well practised greeting, "Your sword sharp and your arrow straight, Your Highness."

Thor smiled at her as she looked up and in so doing he seemed to shine like a sun, the halo of his golden hair like an aurora. A child though he was- all chubby cheeks and sweet, short, upturned nose- his features were strong and his startling, sky-blue eyes were bright with life and laughter. She felt the power of his personality like a warmth emanating from his person, and she quickly found herself genuinely smiling back. Now she saw his princeliness, his will; the easy confidence in his stance clearly came to him as naturally as breathing.

Her mother then commended her to the second son, and she repeated the bow, "Your path narrow and your burden light, Your Highness."

Loki did not smile. Not quite. There was a slight quirk of his mouth at the corners and the fleeting impression of tiny dimples in his pale cheeks, but his eyes glittered with apprehension and his lips remained tightly pressed together. Already noticeably more slight and shockingly dark in contrast to his brother's blinding light, those marshy blue-grey eyes looked enormous in his slim, pointy-chinned face. Where Thor was aptly likened to a lion cub in her mind, she was tempted to compare Loki disfavourably to some small woodland creature.

He touched her hand with his skinny fingers, as if she were a new play thing and he wanted to test her reality and his ownership. "Shall she always play with us?" he turned a mournfully entreating expression up to his mother, "Not like the other girls?"

Sif felt chilled by his shy, imploring tone. This was a prince of Asgard?

The Queen ran an elegant, be-ringed hand over her son's unfortunate pitch-black hair, "Sif is not to study to be my handmaiden, Loki. She is to be a warrior alongside you."

The prince turned to look at her again, studying her with disquieting intensity. He touched his fingertips to his lips and drew them away, greenish purple mist swirling then solidifying between his pointer finger and thumb into a miniature sword in delicate wrought gold. He held it out to her solemnly, his eyes on her long, flaxen curls, "Pin up your hair, or they'll pull it in the practise ring. It hurts."

She looked to her mother, then the Queen, then took it, bewildered and discomfited. "Thank-you, Your Highness."

He bowed his head and turned to run away from the small gathering, pulling free of his mother's hand like a baby and tossing his stately green cloak to the ground without ceremony. She did not like him. He was only a little second son, he couldn't tell her what to do.

She slid the sword-pin into a pocket on her girdle.

.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.

Thor had his first of many growth spurts shortly after she was formally introduced at court as an apprentice warrior; his head now level with hers and his shoulders already broader, she became his frequent sparring partner. The sole legitimate child of a blood brother to the King, it fell to her to take up the family honour and with it her father's sword. It was not a thing unheard of for an only daughter, but it was rare enough and the fightmasters put her through her paces before they believed she was worth their teaching. Some still had their doubts.

But she was solid and quick and she learned fast. Her footwork and technique were always superior to that of her royal training partner, but Thor's swiftly growing strength and greater weight still gave him enough advantage that their bouts were evenly matched.

Loki had not grown much and remained small and thin, his dark head and perpetually colour-stained fingers (he was forever drawing) leading her to dub him 'soot' and 'muck-frog' and to chase him around the ring as Thor watched and shrieked with laughter. Little though he was, however, he was faster than the older children and nimble as a cat. He could nearly always outrun her or out climb her until she became too frustrated to follow and stomped off in a fit of temper.

"If you would stop pulling her braid, brother," Thor called up from the base of the tree they were currently climbing, "she would not seek such vengeance!"

"It's her!" Loki pulled a rope out of the air with his magic and slid down it from somewhere far above her in the canopy of the tree. He was soon just a dark blot next to the light blot of Thor on the distant ground. "She said I was sleeping in the cinders and rolling in the ashes. She said no prince could have ugly black hair."

"You told her she made oxen look clever."

"She couldn't read the runes on her own sword. She's stupid."

Thor squinted, not one for academics any more than Sif was and unsympathetic to Loki's repeated attempts to prove his unnatural, musty interests could help win a fight, "Did you change them with magic?"

"She could never read it! She memorised the inscription!"

Bored of the argument, Thor pushed Loki over and tried to pin him. Loki, slippery as an eel, wriggled free and put his brother down with a well-placed kick to the solar plexus. Knowing the fight would turn earnest and that he would definitely lose, he took off toward the palace. Thor blinked after him and, having regained his breath, hollered abuse about cheating and cowardice at his back.

Sif sat in the tree and glared at his retreating figure. It wasn't right for a warrior prince to do such wily magic as he did, to always slide around the edges of a real fight and retreat wherever he could. He was elegant enough with a practise sword, but he kept his distance and his guard up; he never pushed in for the attack, he never won without sly tricks. He had no love for battle and no aptitude for berserker style.

He set traps for her and tricked her into saying mortifying things, he ran away from her just anger and set more traps still. He mocked her in their lessons, even in front of the Queen. He sometimes allowed her to persist in humiliating misunderstandings when he helped her with her studies, though he did almost always help; his quick mind and gift with words made him an invaluable if impatient tutor. He carved her flowers out of ice, he spun her dragons from sugar, once in a great while he jested and she laughed in spite of herself.

It was a real question in her mind whether he had honour. Whether he were worthy for his station. Whether they were friends.

.,.„.,.,.,.

He had been among the Elves studying magic for much longer than she had thought. Not having much missed him after the first few shocks of his absence, she had lost track of the stars and herself in a comfortable routine. She finally had Thor's complete attention, undivided by his secret amusements with his brother and the annoyingly impenetrable conversations the two would have, giggling together like a pair of old gossips. The Loki Thor endlessly praised to her, the Loki who was forever witty and cunning and sportsmanlike in games of both mind and body, did not much resemble the sullen, quiet, quick to offence, and boringly bookish little boy with whom she was more often acquainted.

He was playful to her only in cruel games. She reasoned that at least he was the best possible person to get into such a one-upmanship contest with, because he never tattled to his parents or his tutours. She'd blacked his eyes and drawn his blood, but when the Queen would ponder his injuries in dismay, he kept his lip steadfastly buttoned. She did the same the day he accidentally broke her arm knocking her from a fence, though he had wanted to try to heal it himself with his magic and this had provoked a screaming row the like of which they'd never had before. Thor, in the middle, had tried uselessly to placate both sides. It had only ended, after his tirade about the thickness of her skull, with Sif's proclamation that the touch of a cowardly witch like him would dishonour her arm forever. Loki had stormed away in silence, white-faced with rage.

He had left for his training only days later. Things were still frostier than their wont, but he had come to take his leave from her all the same. He said he must go to the Elves to meet with adequate instruction, elaborating grandly about his innate magical abilities being the greatest on Asgard since his father's childhood many ages ago. She had dismissed this as his vanity. He was jealous of his brains and his magic, hoarding his small, uncoveted gifts; resentful of she and Thor for their bravery, their honour, and their fair hair. He'd called her a flaxen twit with a great golden dog. She'd said it would be good to finally shake all the soot from her clothes. They'd glared and then grinned at each other.

It was an uneasy friendship and she was glad he was going away awhile. She preferred the simple, natural bond of like-to-like she shared with Thor to the prickly truce between herself and he that should-not-be-as-he-is. Thor was what a prince ought to be. Trustworthy to his bones, unmatched in strength, never conniving, no deceptive magic; one always knew where one stood with him, he always took the straightest path to every end as a warrior should.

She only realised how long Loki had been gone when she passed him in a palace corridor on the day of his return and did not know him. He called out after her and, his voice having fallen, she would not have known that either if he had not addressed her as 'both sooty and rude'.

For the first time in her life, she was forced to look up to meet his eyes. No longer a child but a willowy youth, he was so grown that he must be quite as tall as one of the King's Guard and nearly a head above her own height. How odd and how discombobulating to lift her chin to someone who had always been, and likely would always be, little in her mind. At least he did not loom over her; he was too self-conscious in his stance to be intimidating, overly aware of his awkward length without proportional breadth. He did not present quite as large a figure as he truly was.

Whatever baby fat there had been in his face, it was all but gone and his was a new leanness of feature, a painfully raw quality of expression. Studying him in her shock, she felt sure this would only become more pronounced with time and that the planes of his face would come together as sharp as flint when he grew into a man. He was far too fine-boned and slender to ever be handsome like his brother, but he was _arresting_. His unseemly raven's-wing hair was iridescent blue and purple in the beam of afternoon sunlight streaking in from outside. It framed him captivatingly, the soft black waves having grown long and being worn loose around his face, making luminous his pale complexion and bright his eyes, more blue than she remembered though still shot with silver-grey. Not clear and cloudless and radiant as Thor's were, but like a rime of frost on a bubbling spring: shining, still.

His unlovely parts took on a kind of eerie fascination as a whole.

"How cruel we are as children, how cruel and thoughtless." She groped for familiarity and found it lacking, falling back on a more formal tone as she struggled to see a boy she knew in his lanky elegance, "I was wrong to malign you so about your hair, Your Highness. I see now that it suits you."

His playful look and shy smile were instantly shattered by an aloof coldness, his lip drawing back from his teeth in a discreet sneer. "I am afraid I must go. I shall see you at the feast, my lady."

Injured and bewildered at this rejection of what she'd half intended to be a blanket apology for whatever fault she bore for their tumultuous childhood friendship, she frowned ferociously at his back and wished he had not returned.

She wished it much more earnestly and with all her might when she rinsed out her hair that evening, pulling free the tiny gold sword pin that would hold it fast with no flying tendrils no matter what wind or heat or stress came to bear, and it tumbled down her back no longer blonde but black as tar. Black as pitch. Almost as black as Loki's own.

Dark and terrible in her heavy, cape-like dressing gown, she exploded into his chambers still dripping bathwater. She was out for blood and she tore through his receiving room into more private areas like a violent whirlwind, making certain that she knocked over as many of his things as she could in passing.

She was so furious she could barely see: caring nothing for the impropriety when she burst into his cabinet and tackled him off of his bench in spite of his being even less suitably attired than she was, only too pleased that she could scratch at the exposed skin of his bare chest.

"Squirrelly, ugly, frizzy-headed _soot __demon_! I'd kill you if it weren't treason!" she smashed him with her elbow on the way down, breaking his lip against his teeth. They crashed to the floor in a heap and she scrambled to get on top of him, pressing his arms to his sides with her knees.

He drew a leg up to where she sat on his upper chest, hooking his heel under her chin and dragging her backward so he could get his hands free. She scrawled ugly lines down his torso with her nails as she went, satisfied to hear him hiss in pain when she broke the skin. He snarled as he came after her, pinning her briefly until she got a leg between their bodies and leveraged them over again. He caught her fist when she reared to punch him and, to her tremendous shock, he was now stronger than she and held off the intended blow without great difficulty.

"Turnabout is fair play, my lady," he grinned unpleasantly at her, his teeth red with blood. "Cease this assault or I will see you in the stocks for striking a prince of Asgard."

Her rage rendered impotent as she moved to strike with her other hand and he seized it too, she pressed against his restraining grasp with all her might while her eyes welled with frustration, "How dare you, how _dare _you!"

"You said you like it now," he purred at her. "You've learned to appreciate the dun. The filth of the less favoured."

"You wretch! I said it suited _you_. Change it back! _I'm_ not a cheating, devious, sickly freak!"

His nostrils flared and he glared at her with burning indignation, "You told me you threw my present away, you told me that! If that had been true nothing would have happened. If you weren't so _spiteful_ to tell me something awful that wasn't even-!"

"So I lied! I was a child and we were arguing! I've grown up, I know better now. How can you still be nursing your minuscule, insignificant wounds after all these years have passed? Everyone else must come into their maturity, but you are an infant to this day. Mewling in your crib for your trinkets!"

"You never wore it, not once. Before I did anything to vex you." His face was twisted up in hurt and anger and petulance, blood dribbling down his chin with every emphatic word, "I vexed you because you never wore it!"

Stony-faced to hide her discomfort and uncertainty, she stared a moment before getting off him and walking a few steps away, her robe pulled more tightly about her like a shield. It took only a few breaths to retrieve something that looked like calm. Sif had discipline. She heard him stand up behind her and hoped he'd cover himself quickly and try to regain a little dignity. "I suppose I must be sorry for that, but we were children and it was so long ago. Loki, please let us try to be friends for Thor's sake. Why does it matter? It was only a tiny thing."

She glanced at him over her shoulder and saw that he'd made no move to dress, looking ridiculous with his thrice-damned hair in a curly tangle and his gangly arms crossed over his skinny adolescent body. He was making a face like he'd tasted sour milk, "It was my best magic, all the girls before… I just wanted to… of course. For Thor's sake. I must remember where import lies."

She cleared her throat, blushing at the havoc she'd wreaked in his room and on his person now that the heat of anger had passed and she was feeling a returning awareness of the significance of their more advanced ages, the new roles they would soon be playing. Feeling distant and strange with him again as she realised he wasn't her little playmate any more. She'd said herself, they were not children any longer and she could not act as though they were. "I am glad that you do."

He followed her eyes to the deep red grooves on his torso and sighed, "I won't let it be known, Sif. It would hardly be to my benefit if I did."

"Thank-you, Your Highness," his title again helped her to centre herself and push away the boy he had been. Still, she hesitated, "I knew you wouldn't. You have never betrayed me."

Loki shrugged, but his gaze was intent, "Loyalty is reciprocal."

.,.,.,.,.

Sif joined Thor as he stared down into the sprawling cosmos at the lip of the broken bridge. His great shoulders were slumped and the fierce light of joy and will that ever lit him with irresistible charisma was dimmed to a flicker by the weight of his sorrow.

"He was not wrong about everything."

She started, not having expected to hear him speak. "About what was he right?"

"He was right to feel slighted and belittled these many years, he was right that I was not prepared to be a king. I was blind to the harms I did in my arrogance, and from my impregnable rightness of place I could not fathom that he felt such terror of having none. My banishment has been a most timely education. What I cannot conscience, what delusion I cannot absolve him from, is that which I suppose must have been what he most could not bear. That he was not loved." Thor turned to her, his handsome face drawn and haggard, "How could he imagine it was so?"

"He took terribly small things to heart, Thor, so long as they were awful. A thing you had, rightly, forgotten altogether he would be using to fuel a simmering stew of his resentment. It is not your fault."

"No," he said firmly, his large hand heavy on her shoulder, "it is. It is not mine only, but it is mine. I am the elder and I led by poor example down the very path he tread in his madness, though I may not have walked so far. I have many times I can only too swiftly recall lived down to the worst possible expectations my brother could have of me. For far too long, I lived thoughtlessly."

Sif grumbled in disagreement, finally mumbling a repetition, "He took everything to heart."

"He did. But there were still many such things to readily take," he dashed his wet eyes with the back of his hand. "I mourn my brother, Sif, seeing him clearly for the first time. Had I looked sooner, I might have aided him. I might have rescued him from a prison of his own making. Perhaps he would not have allowed it and nothing would be altered, but my soul would be easier knowing I had ever tried. That I had ever seen trying was needed."

A silence passed. She stared at the shards of the Bifrost.

"Loki once offered to restore my hair if I would agree to wear a certain pin in it every day until your coronation. I refused, I said he was too petty to be indulged." She ran her hand through her long dark hair, silky strands slipping over her fingers like water, stardust glittering in its shiny length, "It was greater pettiness perhaps to resist such a trivial arrangement, but in truth I think I had grown grudgingly fond of this black soot."

She didn't realise she was weeping until Thor's strong arms embraced her and pressed her to his broad chest, his voice murmuring warm comfort in her ear.


	6. Felicity

6. Felicity

.

Thor supposed it would have been asking a great deal to expect Loki to resist the opportunity.

He had, after all, not seen his brother in so long that the edges of his memory had become polished with handling, his habitual sly smile slightly bright and lacking focus in Thor's mind. That would never have prevented him from knowing it at once, of course, but Loki had anticipated this.

His choice of greeting upon coming home from the Elves was to dress himself in the same yellow-gold armour Thor's swordmaster Aðalbrandr was seldom seen without and to lie in wait until he could catch Thor stealing from the armoury larder. Aðalbrandr alone could produce the singularly succulent honey apples that he shared with his pupils only one at a time and once in a great while as a reward for being the best and most attentive student in the ring.

Thor had received this honour very seldom indeed, and felt himself ill used enough that theft was justified. He was, as was his habit on rare days when he knew the apples had been prepared, soon to be found creeping his way toward the cupboard where they were kept and lifting one silently to his lips.

"And what might you be doing, O great princeling Odinson? Wise enough to overturn the judgement of your elders and your teachers so soon? Perhaps I should inform your father the king that you think yourself ready to take his throne from him!"

Whirling toward the source of the shouting, Thor tried to swallow half an apple without choking and smile innocently at the same moment. His heavy brows lowered in confusion as he wondered how his teacher could have outflanked him. Surely he had left him on the other side of the exercise yard?

A flawless mimic of old and now equipped with something nearer a man's full range of vocal pitch rather than a boy's, Loki's tirade fooled Thor for the twenty seconds or so it took to spot the familiar armoured silhouette in the dim of the unlit room and to sense that something was slightly amiss with it. He had drawn breath to ask Aðalbrandr to show himself, his hand straying toward a staff leaning against the table behind him, when his confusion was resolved by Loki's insuppressible amusement.

No matter his disguise, Loki could never be anyone but himself when he laughed. He laughed from the tips of his toes to the ends of his hair, bending back like a bow and then falling forward to stamp and clutch his sides.

"Brother?" Thor was half convinced the apples had been drugged.

"Did not you miss me, not to know me, you great oaf!" Loki's eyes, no mistaking, sparkling like mountain water as he stepped into the sunlight.

Thor could not contain the smile, nor the roar of greeting, nor the bone-shattering embrace this sudden appearance provoked. Clasping Loki at the shoulders as he'd used to do to steady his slight frame during practise with the heavy wooden broadswords, he fully appreciated that his little brother now stood almost his equal in height and the muscle beneath his hands felt haler and more hearty than it had ever portended to being in childhood. How wonderful it was! He'd begun to fear as a boy that Loki was truly sickly, destined to the shameful unlife of an invalid.

"So you come scampering back in disguise, finally so bored by all that magic and learning that you could do nothing but escape," he pounded Loki's shoulder in his enthusiasm. "I knew the day would come!"

Slightly staggered by the blows and giving Thor a fondly exasperated look, Loki threaded a guiding arm around his brother's back and turned their steps toward the palace gardens, "It would bode better for the good of Asgard if it _were_ occasionally I who had escaped my schoolroom. Sadly, you have all that sort of adventure taken for yourself."

"And the lies begin," Thor crowed, "or have you forgotten that you became a genius of diversion and retreat but no statesman in old Egill's lectures on statecraft?"

"I deny everything except my genius."

Laughing in pleasure, Thor squeezed the shoulder where his hand still rested. "I missed you every day, brother."

"I have no doubt that you did," Loki said, "you must have found it dreadfully difficult doing your own sums and filching mother's pastries without an accomplice."

"I employed the direct approach, as a warrior ought; I took them in a single glorious charge and was prepared to face my doom if caught."

Loki snorted, "And it works most excellently until the day one's doom isn't begging an indulgent parent for forgiveness. The art of subtlety is frightfully useful, I would have you know. One day, Thor, you will wish you had listened more to me."

"There is listening and there is heeding," Thor reminded, enjoying the well-trodden debate. His brother's novel notions had not yet ceased to amuse him. "A prince must take his own counsel."

"I, too, am a prince: I can bear the burden of forethought and choice-making for you and leave your firstborn's time free to pursue more important matters. Like ill-gotten honey apples and being startled like a young gazelle."

Thor tried to elbow him and they swayed as Loki bent inward to protect his ribs, both chuckling.

"I shouldn't like to see you tax yourself overmuch with troubling thought," Loki explained, his voice all exaggerated concern and sympathy. It was strange for Thor, hearing the impish tones and familiar cadences of Loki's conversation- the music of which he knew as dearly as his own cradle song- in a young man's voice rather than the childish soprano he so well remembered. He imagined Loki must feel similarly odd about him; although, with his being older and quicker-growing, the changes in himself since their parting were less pronounced.

"Have you no love for your elder brother at all?" Thor teased with mock tragedy. Change the superficial though time might, nothing important had been altered. Could be altered.

Loki's lips curled up coyly, "I have every love and no pity."

"How truly you speak. For once." Thor twinkled at his brother, needling him in the side.

"Close your great maw or I'll turn you into a frog."

"Bringing me down to your state?"

Loki glared at him for that one, pulling the borrowed helm from his brow and shaking out his hair. He tossed the helmet behind him, knowing a gardener would discover it afore long. "I still fail to see how she thinks that epithet applies. I ought to have filled her bath with the creatures."

"I am shocked to learn you never did," Thor pulled away from their companionable walk to stretch his arms out and turn his face up to the bright sun of the afternoon. "I was certain I had only failed to hear of it because the threat of Sif's wrath ensured a dearth of gossip."

"The thought occurred," Loki admitted, looking somewhat wistful. "I could manage it easily now, my skill is so much expanded by my studies that to conjure thousands of wriggling things even from the aether would be a mere trifle. You cannot imagine it, Thor!"

Even in his glee to see his brother, Thor's interest flagged upon the turn of the subject to magical study. "Indeed?"

Loki shot him a look, knowing him well. "You recall I was always best with knives and bow? Now I can conjure ammunition as quick as I can throw it. I need carry no belts of daggers and no quiver. I should not think it will be long until I need no bow."

"Truly?" Thor's excitement returned somewhat. Ranged combat was almost the least glorious engagement possible in battle, but he had been proud to see his brother best all others at any kind of weaponry. With this advantage, Loki would remain forever unsurpassed.

He smiled wryly, "Have I ever lied to you, brother?"

"A question I feel certain you do not wish me to answer."

Loki nearly succeeded in tripping him and Thor roared as he leapt to tackle him in retaliation. Just as his arms were about to close around Loki's torso, however, his brother was abruptly no longer there and Thor fell so awkwardly that he was barely able to roll up into a crouch. Casting about him in utter shock, he caught sight of Loki standing a small distance off: laughing again.

"Brother! What in the Nine Realms-?" he jogged over and grabbed at Loki's flailing arm, trying to shake him out of his mirth. "Loki!"

Struggling to breathe, Loki couldn't seem to look at Thor without bursting into guffaws, so he turned away. "You should have seen your face, brother! You looked so _outraged_!" he hiccuped and failed to swallow a fit of giggles.

His patience thinning as his astonishment gave way to irritated confusion, Thor just growled.

"It is a simple illusion, Thor," Loki finally managed, wiping his eyes and grinning unrepentantly, "I make myself not where I was when my presence was last confirmed by the subject and then project an insubstantial image where I want myself presumed to be. It's essentially no more than a sleight of hand, a trick of the light."

Sifting the unnecessarily convoluted wording of that explanation, Thor shook his head, "You mustn't do that to me again, brother. I found it most unnerving."

Loki waved his hand dismissively, "It is nothing to unnerve you."

"Nevertheless, you must not practise it on me. Save it for Sif and the others," Thor commanded grumpily. He opted to magnanimously ignore Loki's poorly concealed delight in his discomfort.

"Unblessed as I am, Thor, would you not agree that I need every advantage my little gifts can give me?"

Suspecting some unsavoury undercurrent in that and loath to so soon reopen their frequently infuriating discussion about what were honourable tactics in battle, Thor just eyed Loki's guileless expression mildly. A small silence passed.

Suddenly, Loki laughed and slapped his back, "You are too serious, brother. Let us go and see what can be pilfered from the kitchen that is clearly meant for other mouths. It's been almost a minute since I had any amusement."

Frowning in more lingering disapproval than he could truly feel in such a moment of felicity as this reunion, Thor followed.

"Are Elves very strange to live with, brother?"

"Oh, very."

"Did you have no companions to make sport with, then?"

"Elves frown on sport."

Thor grinned. "Is that so?"

Loki grinned back, a devious light in his eyes, "So very much. I had to be quite cautious so as not to perturb them unduly."

"You are terribly conscientious of such things, brother."

"Of course I am," Loki said self-importantly, "everyone knows I am the last bastion of good breeding in this family."

"I shall remind father of it so you may be rewarded for your example."

"So cruel you are to me."

"What a man earns, he cannot call unjust payment."

Loki slung an arm around Thor's neck, whispering conspiratorially, "Then you concede that you are owed every vexation I can conceive of for you. For surely, you recall the slant of the tally when we parted ways? You joined forces with the Lady Disdain, do not think that I have forgotten it, and it was a most foul treason to your own blood."

"Brother, I fear not the worst rain of your vengeance upon me, so absolute is my confidence in your tedious inclination to unwarranted temperance."

"Such valour."

Thor just grinned again, challengingly. It was so good to have his brother back.


	7. Spirits

7. Spirits

.

It was a strange week.

Erik- back from a few days at SHIELD, probably at least half spent refusing to report on Jane's new lab hand- had not exactly thrown caution to the wind just yet. Between ominous predictions and cynical proclamations about how obvious the trap being laid was, however, he was waxing disturbingly near to giddy about Luke's undeniable brilliance. He was quite taken with the observer-quantum-uncertainty-something that Luke was still trying to adequately explain to them, but then Erik had always had the soul of a poet hidden under his lab coat.

Recalling his staunch disapproval at regular intervals, he'd tell Jane that no one so useful could possibly have just wandered in by chance and that Luke's lack of technical familiarity pointed to him being a spy given a crash course rather than an eccentric hobbyist. Erik was extraordinarily suspicious of coincidences in the best of times, which these were not. He was still upset about Norse mythology being somehow, tenuously, related to fact.

Jane was more inclined to think that Luke's impatience, peculiar ignorances, and general air of a genius who doesn't quite realise that he is a genius was far too genuine to be part of an act. If he were a spy, surely he would be easier to take and more believable. There would be some neatly constructed plausible lies to answer all their questions, not evasive vagueness and confused stares. Someone would have briefed him, someone would have taught him to act more like a regular dude. Anyone who could fake the glowing enthusiasm for the cosmos and the ecstasy in seeing her recognise and understand his ideas about it that he'd been exhibiting could certainly fake ordinariness.

She had a weird, baseless hunch that he could have convinced her he'd been born and raised in Puente Antiguo if he had wanted to.

Darcy, joining them through the magic of Skype and her hopelessly out-of-date webcam, was still firmly of the opinion that divine providence was at work. Which, contrariwise, made Erik's eyes roll heavenward as if to appeal to God for a direct refutation.

"He's no secret agent, you guys. Secret agents aren't awkward and mysterious, they train on purpose not to be. He sounds exactly like the typical brainy loner who does this stuff for fun just like he says he is," Darcy adjudged, looking up at the camera from painting her toenails. The original purpose of the call was Jane checking up on her not-really-protégé's credit situation, as there had been some concern on that front, but all was apparently well and the conversation had drifted back to Mr Mysterious. Darcy's new favourite topic.

Not sure if she was quite in the camera's line of sight, Jane shot her open laptop a cautious look as she chewed her lip. "How so?"

"Majorly gifted quiet types don't stand out academically, right, because the curriculum bores them but they don't make waves about it and nobody knows that's what's going down. Between being quiet and getting shit for nerdiness they're not so into socialising, so they don't really have an idea of what normal is all about or where the smartness line actually is. They're out being mad bright and getting esoterically super-informed without realising how easily they become all niche and advanced class about stuff, and then they interact and don't get that regular people aren't slow, _they__'__re_ quick. They think everyone else is just being dense." She admired her hot pink toes and smiled in satisfaction. "You guys picking up what I'm putting down over there?"

Jane shook her head fondly at Darcy's characteristically uncanny ability to put her finger straight on it. "I was actually kinda thinking the same thing."

"Right? I dated a computer science type once and let me tell you, they have a very warped idea of what is and isn't common knowledge. You're much more aware that some of us still live on Earth. I may not be an astrophysicist, but I'm not totally blonde either."

"Hey, I'm on the fair side over here," Jane warned, fluffing the end of her ponytail meaningfully at the camera, "and I own your credits."

Darcy pulled some kind of cheeky face, but the jumpy, crappy video made it hard to catch. "You have the soul of a brunette, boss. Anyway. How goes it? You think we'll be touring Asgarden next summer?"

"Asgard, and no, probably not." She sighed and rested her chin on her palm glumly. "I feel like we've made huge leaps in understanding, but the practical application seems miles out of reach. The kind of power you'd need to even think about trying to open a stable wormhole is stupid."

"Not to mention getting your hands on exotic matter." Erik mumbled, frowning at some equations on one of the half dozen computer screens that lit the lab.

"Double not to mention how to direct it. Luke said something about designing a little device that can produce antimatter and being able to manipulate the properties of what it produces, but he has to be confused or trying to Punk me or something." Jane thought back over it and honestly couldn't make a decision. She wouldn't have thought he was the type to pull her leg, but then he'd practically dared her to acknowledge the glove and start a prank war whenever she felt like it because he'd be ready for her.

Returning, as promised, the morning after Jane's _faux __pas_, Luke wore his now-familiar suit in a way that managed to project an increase in formality without undergoing any tangible change in tailoring. His hair was so firmly glued to his head that it looked painted on and slightly slick with whatever he'd combed into it to convince it not to fall naturally. Already severe as a marble effigy, his profile seemed even sharper and his forehead even higher. If he was trying to look like the angel of death, he was well on his way.

Jane couldn't contain her exasperated smile when she opened the door to him and took in his rigid stance, his shoulders so painfully upright that he looked like he was wearing body armour. In spite of his tremendous effort towards grimness, his prim expression (with slight pretensions to martyrdom) was a bit too adorably obvious for her to despair of stopping this sulk before it really got started. "Don't you own jeans? I swear I remember telling you about the dress code."

A tiny wrinkle formed between his eyebrows and he glanced down at himself, then at her slightly threadbare blue jeans (not intentionally distressed, they dated back to her freshman year and came by their worn knees honestly), smiley-face sun t-shirt (not worn ironically), and the frumpy cardigan she always threw on top in order to pretend she had a deliberate casual-academic look. Or to curl up in, if necessary. It was like a portable couch, down to the odd bits found in the cracks.

He said nothing until their eyes met again, "Your 'dress code'... is 'jeans'?"

She wondered if he understood which item of clothing the word referred to, or if he'd even got that far. It was hard to tell with him, he might just be dripping delicate scorn on her sartorial choices. Did people wear jeans in Africa? They sure did in Oxford when they could get away with it. She just nodded, "Yes. Jeans are the dress code. From now on, buddy."

He blinked to himself a moment and then made to go past her, waiting until she sensed his intention and stepped aside to give him space. "I shall correct my attire before our next meeting. I _do _prefer to stand on ceremony, Jane, though I'm... Oh." Catching sight of Erik leaning over a computer nestled among the tech detritus on her worktable, he stopped dead, "I did not realise..."

Jane hurried over to rescue him from the wave of politeness which seemed to have swamped him speechless, "Luke, this is Erik. Erik, Luke."

"Dr. Erik Selvig, yes?" Luke asked, leaning toward Erik to shake hands. He managed it with an almost flawlessly natural ease which he had painfully lacked when he met Jane. Was shaking hands all the time an American thing that he hadn't got used to yet? she wondered. Or maybe she just intimidated him. That was likely.

"You know my work?" Erik threw an amazingly unsubtle This is Suspicious look her way.

Luke smiled with utterly disarming charm, touching a finger to the side of his nose like he was sharing a secret, "I have perused your submissions to publicly available journals most avidly, doctor, since I discovered your connection to Jane."

"That interested, were you?"

Luke's smile turned boyish, his tone conspiratorial, "Am I to be faulted? Is not Miss Foster standing alone in her field?"

Erik's eyebrows rose.

"Annnnyway," Jane put herself between them, fiddling with the notepad she'd been carrying, "Luke's got a new angle I'd love to get your thoughts on if you're interested in, you know, something besides embarrassing me."

They'd spent pretty much the entire ensuing week sitting around in the living room-ish quadrant of the lab yelling at each other about physics and outlandish, sci-fi-esque theories of wormhole travel. Luke, disadvantaged by his limited understanding of jargon and almost total unfamiliarity with notation, was reduced to asking for frequent explanations, sometimes through gritted teeth. It wasn't that he seemed to mind needing to learn or asking questions: he'd been doing that happily enough with Jane and only became impatient when she continued to explain after he felt he'd got the jist, but he obviously hated to fall behind the conversation. When they argued over his head, she finally noticed on the third day, he got this look on his face of what she could only describe as seething resignation. Like a star player sitting on the bench but determined to wait for the coach's call. Like he was used to it, expected it, and bitterly resented it at all once.

She was becoming desperate in her curiosity to know what his real life was. What had made him into the odd person that confronted her, what his education had been like. So she ended their Friday evening bickering at a semi-sensible mealtime and announced they were going to the bar for dinner.

If liquor couldn't loosen his lips, she'd send out for some sodium pentothal.

It was, luckily enough, the first day he'd managed to bring himself to obey her edict to dress more like a normal person and less like he'd just walked off a runway somewhere. It would cause enough comment just parading someone so inherently noticeable in front of the bored locals, he didn't need to flagrantly not belong in their scruffy company. Even in black denim, black t-shirt, and a charcoal blazer, he cut such an august figure that she worried people would gossip he was incognito minor European royalty or something. Not that she ever caught herself theorising in that direction at all.

As they walked to the bar she only just stopped herself from grabbing his hands to still them as he gesticulated uncontrollably when he was really into what he was saying, and tried to interrupt as gently as possible when interruption was necessary.

"Luke, _Luke_, you're almost explaining Special Relativity. We've got a pretty good handle on that. Just finish what you were saying about calculating destinations with those principles in mind, I promise I can steer you right if you start going wrong there."

"That's just a vacuum chamber. I could set one up in the lab, it wouldn't be that hard."

"It'd be anacoustic, though, so you couldn't."

He always turned to look at her with a burningly intent, searching expression, his eyebrows slightly drawn up in the middle and making his focus seem tinged with sadness somehow. He didn't come across as terribly aware of what bleeding edge technology _wasn__'__t_ capable of for someone who read scientific journals, seeming mildly inconvenienced and personally disappointed when she called out his suggestions as functionally, rather than fundamentally impossible.

Then he got this thoughtful look that she found a little bit disconcerting.

It was like he was dead certain she was wrong and both smug and miffed about it.

.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.

He made a dismayed, disgusted, confused face at the menu she couldn't even begin to work out, so she took it away from him and ordered an enormous amount of beer and a bunch of finger food. She was going to find out at some point what the hell he'd been eating and where he'd been staying, because she just had to know. He clearly hadn't been coming in here: the wait staff took turns 'checking' on them and then huddling in the corner to whisper to each other. Probably spreading it all around that Jane had finally revealed her reason for turning down every date she'd been offered since her arrival in New Mexico. It would be everywhere in the morning that her exotic, male model, secret agent, foreign dignitary boyfriend had come to visit.

At least the small town assuming Luke had to be _with_ her with her because he'd come through the door in her vicinity meant she didn't have to watch half the bar try to hit on him. Entertaining as that might have been.

Erik wasn't too keen on her beer selection and called for another pitcher of something else. Which was probably where trouble began, because it made ordering two of the same seem like a good idea when the first ones were gone.

Luke had tasted the beer and looked slightly surprised before going back for a bigger sip, so Jane figured her plan to get him drunk enough to loosen up was well on its way. The fact that the plan became increasingly fuzzy as the evening wore on reminded her that she was much, much smaller than either of the men and would likely be off her face before they could get past buzzed. Slowing her consumption to a crawl allowed her to observe her mentor getting happier with every pint and Luke being utterly unchanged. And that the room was still tilting a bit more than usual.

He could not possibly have _that_ much more muscle mass than Erik, he was too thin. Yet, beer disappeared from his glass just as quickly and he remained incongruously, annoyingly sober.

"Luke, be real with me, because it's seriously killing me," she leaned her elbow on the table to support her cheek, ignoring the wounded glare she was getting from Erik for interrupting his anecdote mid-sentence, "I'm a scientist and my curiosity is the curiosity of ten regular men."

"I have noted that about you, funnily enough."

She frowned at him, at his mild tone, wondering if he was aware that sarcasm was anger's ugly cousin, "Well, answer me then!"

"I would, Jane," Luke allowed in the same patient voice, "if you had asked me a question."

Jane stared at the empty and half-empty pitchers on the table and tried to recall the conversation. She watched Erik's fingers clumsily playing with a wayward curly fry and couldn't even remember what she had been thinking about. "I asked it in my head."

"Alas, I am not privy to what dwells there unless it makes its way out."

"You really think you can make a matter-antimatter annihilation engine of a not only humanly possible, but easily workable size?" Erik suddenly asked, snapping back to much earlier in the evening. He swayed slightly, his words stumbling over each other. "What do you know that all of the scientific community doesn't know?"

Smiling enigmatically, Luke poured himself another beer. "Much, I should think."

Erik frowned at Jane and she shrugged. In her cups and at this precipice of weirdness, she was prepared to believe it.

"And you have a desktop-sized particle accelerator that somehow doesn't need outside power. That's what you're telling me."

Luke sipped and Jane watched him lick his lips a little more shamelessly than she would have if her bloodstream weren't so flooded by judgement impairing chemicals. He didn't seem to notice, "Perhaps."

Erik staggered to his feet, "This is worse than the other guy."

"And look how that turned out." Jane muttered, more optimistic than it made any sense to be. Maybe it was just the beer, but right now she thought Luke could do all the things he was intimating he could. His knowledge was so weird. So empirical. Maybe he'd experienced the natural world somehow differently and his insight was genuine. Stranger things had happened; to her, even. She blinked as Erik turned away, "Where are you going?"

"Home to bed. I think I'm dreaming again."

They stared at him as he made his slow way to the door, then they looked at each other.

"I will escort you back to your laboratory," Luke announced with a certain gentlemanly propriety that registered his disapproval of Erik leaving her to her own devices in a vulnerable state. She was about to object to the possible implications of this sentiment when he stood up- with all of his accustomed grace and not even the smallest sign of intoxication- and she pitched forward trying to follow him. He caught her by the shoulder and held her up with just the tips of his fingers. "I must insist you take my arm, under the circumstances."

Giggling to herself over his ridiculous manners, she slid to the edge of the booth and curled her hand under and around his raised forearm, using him as a crutch to lever herself up and semi-accidently flinging herself off the raised platform they'd been seated on. He didn't give a millimetre for a single instant under the sudden pressure of her entire body weight swinging on the extremity of his fully extended arm, the muscles had not even braced involuntarily against the unexpected load. "Do you work out?" she blurted as she got her feet under her again. He was so strong.

"Out of doors?" he asked puzzledly, steadying her again with his free hand and beginning to lead her to the exit. He had to bend down slightly so she could lean on his arm, and vastly shorten his long stride to accommodate her drunken gait.

She tried to muffle her laughter in her sleeve and snorted. "No. Nevermind."

The cool night air woke her up just a little bit and she touched her flushed cheeks self-consciously. "Luke, really, what are you doing here? I keep asking and you keep deflecting."

"I have answered you at least twice, Jane." He spoke slowly, as if she were very stupid.

"Okay, so you're super fascinated by my research and I grant you that no one is doing what I'm doing. I guess that makes sense, but Luke, you are terrifyingly brilliant, you've got money, if you're so interested and have so many ideas, I don't get what you need me for." There was a part of her that was feeling almost as afraid as she was excited by the possibilities she recognised in his thoughts, part of her that had enough room left after the professional awe and pride to be insecure. This was her life's work and he was grasping it all so quickly, there was an academic misfit at the back of her brain racked with fear of losing her extremely hard-earned place to someone who was just naturally, effortlessly better.

When he answered, he sounded far away, "You said it yourself, Jane. You are a scientist. I am an amateur."

"Right," she clutched his arm a little harder as they descended a curb to cross the street. "So why do you say you have nothing else to do in the whole world? That can't be true."

"Can't it?"

She shot him a look, trying to glare so many daggers at his aristocratic profile that he'd actually feel the sting. "Apart from the obvious, there's also the fact that you're rich and interesting and charismatic, you could probably make your 'not obscene' fortune truly offensive in any career you felt like trying."

"Likely I could," he conceded, "but what would be the point? Did I ever lead you to believe that money and notoriety are the things I desire to gain from this enterprise? What is 'the obvious'?"

"I mean, the obvious fact that you can't hurt for company."

He slowed their already glacial progress, "How is that?"

Sensing something dangerous lurking around this conversation, Jane swallowed her instinctive sharp retort and tried to give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he was just confused. "Like, I doubt Johnny Depp goes home alone unless he wants to."

"Who?"

"He's an actor."

"Oh, yes," he said in a manner that suggested he'd heard of him after all. Jane doubted it.

She was sure he was missing the plot still anyway, "Really, really good-looking."

He stared ahead blankly, apparently not seeing the relevance of this information, "Ah, indeed. Not having any prizable features, I try to save myself the energy consumed in envy by avoiding notice of the aesthetic graces of other men."

Jane nearly choked. He turned to her with a look of equal parts such profound reproach that she wanted to bake him an apology cake and a warning of terrible anger should she persist in this course.

"Oh," she murmured in total shock, "you're serious?"

He'd stopped altogether, his head tilted as he looked at her uneasily, his lips pressed together with an air of palpable defensiveness. She noticed his hair coming unstuck again, falling slightly away from his scalp above his ears but still in its shellacked lines where the comb had pulled through. The hand not supporting her was shoved into his pocket and his posture was as staunchly upright as ever, though he seemed to be leaning away from her.

"Are you going to stand there and tell me you're not aware of what you look like?"

It was almost like she'd slapped him. He opened his mouth to make what was obviously going to be the most hurtful comment he could think of probably followed by some tirade about what he thought he looked like, but she headed him off at the pass, finally convinced he was operating under some very serious delusions.

"You are incredibly handsome, I _cannot_ _believe_ you don't know that. Did you not see those girls at the bar with their tongues hanging out? Didn't Darcy harass you? She must have. She has no filter between her brain and her mouth and she told me what she thought of you. Like, whatever your issues, you can't tell me you went to University and everything and didn't find out that you were hot."

He was turning an interesting colour and he was fidgeting frantically with his jacket, his voice strangled as he answered, "I assure you I did not. At home... it was very clear that I was not... No one there would have considered me attractive. I fit absolutely none of the standards, and I was very much aware of it. I find it difficult to believe standards could be so different elsewhere."

Jane felt like this might be the weirdest encounter she'd had with him yet. It couldn't be countenanced. It just could not. The evidence was overwhelmingly against it. Even right then, uncomfortable and discombobulated to the point that he looked as though he'd like to die on the spot, he was so preposterously lovely that she honestly could not imagine a world in which he was not Considered Attractive. She wanted to kiss along the lengths of his beautiful fingers and run her hands over the wide breadth of his shoulders and down the long muscles of his back to his slim waist. She wanted to scratch her nails gently through his hair until it was soft and wavy, maybe even corkscrew curly, the way it obviously wanted to be. Hell, she wanted to kiss that strange, haunted look off his heartbreakingly pretty face and nuzzle his perfect cheekbones.

Yep, she was drunk. Point being, there was no way this man could be called ugly. He could not be this insecure.

Patting his arm, she tried to smile reassuringly, "Honey, things are that different. Believe me. Now help me get home before you have to carry me."

He was saying something in response, but she didn't really hear; the last couple beers were metabolising and she was still getting more sloshed. They were at her trailer before she'd really regathered her brain cells. She got the door open, but she stared at the steep steps and large gap between trailer and ground with mournful certainty that she wouldn't make it. Luke made a wordless 'permission to touch?' motion and, at her nod, held her gently by the elbows and lifted her over the stairs entirely, waiting for her to get a grip on something before he let go.

He bowed to her slightly and shut the door before she could think of anything to say.

There would be a lot of thoughts to be had about this in the morning, she was sure. Right now, however, there was only sleep.


	8. Rip

8. Rip

.

It wasn't so much the hangover- which really could have been so much worse: she recalled a celebration dinner back at Culver Uni that had involved such an extremity of vodka that blinking had become a Herculean labour alike to being an arthritic contortionist, this was a mild ache and a slightly upset stomach, this she could handle- as the total agony of embarrassment, that had her pinned under the bedclothes in a state of humiliated lethargy.

Talk about a clever idea. She was supposed to be smart. She should have thought through the contingencies, realised she had no idea of his alcohol tolerance, realised she could end up making a complete idiot of herself in public, realised she could say something super majorly inappropriate. Which she kind of had. Sort of. She wasn't sure how inappropriate her many blunt pronouncements really were; she hadn't been getting out a lot lately. But anyway, as usual, the burning need for answers had overridden the common sense which told her she was acting like a teenage busybody.

She didn't even have anything to show for it, Luke's purpose and motivations were as elusive as ever. The only thing she had learned about him was that he maybe, apparently had no idea that he was gorgeous. Jane still found this extremely difficult to accept.

She was still staring at the ceiling in abject regret when the soft knock came. It made her sit straight up and stare around the fridge at what she could see of the door. Erik would never be up yet, Darcy was miles away, and the odd time strangers came around they always went over to the lab. It being an actual building and all.

Which meant Luke was trying to ruin her life on purpose. What had she done to deserve that? Did he still think she'd been making fun of him? Could he really be that tragically misguided?

Jane finger-combed her hair into slightly less of a horrific tangle and smoothed her oversize t-shirt and flannel comfy pants. She was not in a fit state to face the possible repercussions of her rampant idiocy the night before at all. Damnit. It wasn't like she usually dressed up to a standard significantly higher than what she had on, but she would have preferred time to assemble some dignity and at least not be wearing something she'd slept in. Well, Mr. Fashion out there would just have to cope. Not that he really seemed cognisant of fashion, _per __se_; it was more that he was apparently unaware that there were clothing options other than bespoke tailored finery. His suits were sharp enough to cut, but he had no obvious understanding of the limitations of their appropriateness. _Focus__, __Jane__. __Rein __in __your __brain__, __Jane__. __This__, __this __right __here__, __is __how __you __get __yourself __into __Situations__. _

Luke had somehow discovered sunglasses. In his new jeans and a button down layered over a t-shirt, he looked a bit like any given grad student. Almost normal. Then he tried to smile in greeting, the corner of his mouth twitching uncertainly upward but not quite making it, and met her eyes over the rim of the glasses with a strangely searching look. The possibility of normality was dispelled. Him being from Africa was really not fully covering his atmosphere of singularity for her at this point.

"I've brought..." he began, holding up a bag, at the same time that she said, "I'm sorry."

He pursed his lips, sucking his cheeks against his teeth and studying her with a kind of edgy reluctance before finally asking, "For what are you sorry, Jane?"

Folding the hem of her t-shirt between her fingers, she hid behind a curtain of her brown-blonde hair and tried not to blush, "For, you know, anything I might have said or done last night that was just too much. I don't remember offending you horribly, but I was a bit less observant than usual, so you know."

"You did spend some time praising my appearance," he said in a tone of forced lightness, as if he were desperately trying to find that funny because somehow he thought that he should.

"Oh God," how could he be so... _so_. She nervously scratched her forehead, checking out his expression surreptitiously and finding it a crude facsimile of dismissive ease. She lost herself momentarily in the breathtakingly awkward realisation that he was not just nice to look at sort of abstractly as he had been before, like a painting one would hang on the wall, but that at some point over the last three weeks, she'd become actually attracted _to _him and overindulgence had floated this unwanted knowledge to the surface of her brain. This made it worse that she clearly had to say something if she wanted to not be the jerk here.

"You were intoxicated," Luke was excusing distantly, misinterpreting her embarrassment, "I quite understand."

"You do, huh?" this was like peeling off a band aid, "What you do you understand?"

Struck speechless, he stared at her like she'd said something offensive.

_Winning __gold __in __the __awkward __conversation __olympics __again __this __year__, __Jane__._ Someone had to put this maniac right and it might as well be her. She couldn't bear to be pussyfooting around this much psychological chaos when there were space-time anomalies to study. "That wasn't the beer talking, you know- well, it was in the sense that I probably wouldn't have been quite that, um, direct, but not in the, um, not... I mean, I meant it. It's _true_. And I kind of think you _don__'__t_ understand that."

One hundred percent of his intimidatingly astute concentration was on her, those cool blue eyes searching her face with disquieting seriousness. He was definitely trying to catch her at something.

"I see," he said at last. He totally didn't, but she was so done talking about this.

"What's in the bag?" she asked, bubbly with relief that she had done her duty as nice person and tried to get through to him- not once but twice- and that they were still talking amicably in spite of his strange, unpredictable reactions to her efforts to be nice to him. She knew one thing about him for sure, she supposed: he could not take a compliment.

He looked at it, then glanced warily back at her before he decided to let it all go, "Some components, requiring only assembly and a few added touches. If I might have access to your 'junk pile' and the tools in the lab, and your superior experience in 'kludging' as you say, I believe I can begin to deliver on some of what I've promised."

Jane blinked in shock, "You've got the components of a particle accelerator in that bag?"

"I believe so," he seemed a trifle smug, slightly amused and gratified by her more-than-half-disbelieving, helpless awe.

"If not the money and fame, what do you want out of this project?" Clearly, if he wasn't totally bonkers, it was true that he did not need her help or her research to acquire money and fame. Which did rather put to bed the scientific espionage theory, though she could no longer make herself consider him being a SHIELD plant even as a mental safety net to keep her on her toes.

He sighed, probably having thought they were done with rehashing last night's conversation, "Jane, I can't tell you that, and it is not because I am plotting against you or attempting to spy on you. No one has hired me and you have nothing I wish to steal. I will entrust you, one last time, with the perfectly unvarnished truth and I will implore you to at length believe it as you have refused to do up until now: the honest answer is that I must do something, and this is the only thing that there is on this planet which can possibly engage my interest."

She narrowed her eyes at him, feeling a mixture of guilt and suspicion and knowing it was all over her face.

"I jest not," he sliced the air between them with his hand, "I want to help you, Jane, I don't know what- if anything- I expect from the end result, but I do want to help you for its own sake. For your own sake. There is no ulterior motive except to enjoy the pursuit and like-minded company."

"Why do you want to?"

"You deserve to succeed. You're closer than anyone else. I have no reason to do it alone." His robotic shrug told her, as he carefully hadn't admitted with words, that he knew he absolutely _could _do it alone and she found she believed that. Even sober, she was starting to think he was actually capable of bending the parameters of the impossible. He always had this air like he was waiting to see if she would give up and ask him to solve everything with a snap of his fingers.

_I __have __no __reason __to __do __it __alone__,_ she thought. Translation: _I _could _do __it __alone __but __what would be the __point? _Leaving aside whether he could or not for a second, she didn't like the picture he was painting. "Is your foster mother still living?"

He recoiled from the blunt question with a shocked intake of breath that was almost a hiss and suddenly sneered nastily at her, "Does your foster father frequently fall drunk and leave you to walk to the edge of the desert alone at night?"

Well, she had wondered what the breaking point would be between his prickliness and her diarrhoea of the mouth. "All right, I think you're pretty clearly super lonely and I've been taking advantage of that to satisfy my curiosity: that's probably wrong, but I'm well into adulthood and Erik doesn't need to hold my hand every second so I'll thank you not to go around casting judgement."

"It's not a question of adulthood, it's a question of vulnerability to attack and suitability of companion, but obviously you were perfectly capable and in no need of assistance last night. Why, I barely had to carry you home, surely no harm would have befallen you. Surely had I been any of those things he so fears I may be, I would have been in no position to take advantage of your suggestive state," his icy sarcasm and the way he used the contrasting velvety smoothness of his voice like a weapon flayed her of defences and hit unerringly home. "I'll thank _you _not to speculate on my emotions or you will find my previous generosity towards your impertinence for the sake of our work runs out extremely quickly."

At an impasse in the wake of his cutting but infuriatingly accurate tirade, they stood in tense silence. Jane felt like a tumble weed should roll through any time now. She didn't want to apologise again because she didn't really feel like she'd done anything wrong this time, and she was losing patience for the lingering rigid formality of his conversation, but she knew they'd both die here if she waited for him to make the first move toward reconciliation. She saved her immovable stubbornness for science and other battles worth winning. It was better, in relationships, to be the peacemaker.

"You can turn my personal questions back on me, you know. You don't have to be constantly drowning in politeness and always accommodating until you can't take it any more."

Luke scoffed in disbelief, "What makes you imagine I could possibly be interested in the insignificant details of your life as you are so relentlessly, inexplicably interested in mine?"

She wanted to laugh at his obvious dissembling, but contained herself to a wry grin, "You're just as curious as I am, Luke, not least about a kindred spirit. Don't pretend like you're not. I've met you."

For a second, several reactions warred on his face and there was some anger there she worried could be explosive. Finally, he just looked surprised and almost pleased, "Indeed, perhaps you are right."

"Usually am." Jane congratulated herself on her ability to deflate his posturing so easily. He always seemed to expect her to fly into a rage and present a great big target for him, but she'd spent far too much time learning to be all right with herself to rise to such transparent bait.

"And you would consider us to be of a kindred spirit?"

"It seems like a good way of putting it. You've got to be the only person I've ever met who thinks quantum entanglement could be better explicated in ballad verse. I don't really get what you mean in that case, but I saw your eyes getting all shiny and I know exactly what you were feeling. I haven't had many friends who really got it, not even in the field. This is my life, I couldn't love it more, pretty much nothing is more important- I don't know if you're in that place about astrophysics in particular, but you definitely are about gaining new understandings of the universe."

He smiled at her and it had a kind of warmth to it she had never seen from him before, shy and cautious, "Would you ever consider me a friend, Jane?"

She smiled back, feeling touched by the tentativeness of his tone in spite of everything, "Sure."

"But not now, because you don't trust me, do you?"

"I think there's a lot you're not telling me. Some of it maybe stuff I actually should know, not just stuff I'd like to know." Hesitating, she felt compelled to be honest even if it were slightly foolhardy, "But I do trust your intellectual integrity, I trust your curiosity. I believe that no one sent you here."

Luke nodded, thoughtful. "Shall we proceed to the laboratory?"

She coloured slightly, "Um, I'll just... if you could just give me a second, I'll get dressed."

"Oh," he looked appalled, "are you not...? Yes, I will wait over... Excuse me."

.,.,.,.,.,.

She finally heard her cellphone vibrating while she was buttoning up the plaid shirt with the two holes in it she had promised herself she would stop wearing one of these days. It turned out Erik had called three times already, having woken and suddenly remembered that he'd abandoned her at the bar, off her face and with the disturbingly sober nefarious element.

Jane rolled her eyes at his mothering and threw the phone on the bed. Thinking about how low her supply of various electronic and other bits of junk was getting, she reconsidered and gathered phone, wallet, keys, and her notebook into a big shoulder bag. An adventure was in order and now she had someone besides Darcy (who usually made it worth it to struggle by herself) to carry crap.

The thing Luke had in his bag was in several pieces, none of which were recognisable as part of anything she had ever seen. Smooth and angular, the components appeared to be some kind of bronze-coloured metal with smaller inner workings in shades of gold and Luke's weird handwriting scratched all over it in labels that she didn't understand. He explained that the material allowed the scale, but he couldn't tell her how in a way that she could follow. There were properties, he said, that allowed a small layer she could see inside of the cylinder to act the same way as fleets of superconducting magnets. It was sounding more like poetry than physics again and listening to him try to make it sound plausible while withholding her own judgement was just giving her a headache. She, in turn, tried to explain why size was always such a problem using the example of the Large Hadron Collider, but succeeded only in making that crease of annoyance appear between his eyebrows.

Her breathless, nauseated hope-terror-burning desire for his device to be real, for him not be crazy, for it all to work- and his frustration with their mutual incomprehension- made it impossible to stay calm and collected. Jane decided they would go to her favourite junk dealer, get distracted enough to breathe for a bit, and play with their toys after. There were other materials they would need before he could put the thing together, anyway, and they might as well be ready to see the madness through to the end. She told him they were going and didn't wait for any argument, heading out of the lab into the driveway. Luke eyed her van with tremendous distrust and she had a passing fancy that he could sense what had happened to her last stray involving it before she told him, amusedly, that they could walk if he preferred.

She enjoyed walking through Puente Antiguo, anyway. The town looked nothing like New Mexico generally, but the elaborate faux-quaintness was sort of endearing. Someday she would have to ask a local to explain how the nostalgic, fifties-style façades and slightly B-movie feel had become the dominant aesthetic of an entire high street. It had to be an interesting story.

Luke walked quietly beside her and looked mildly predatory. Unsmiling, eyes forward, and always walking with palpable purpose in his every step, he managed to seem both extremely out of place and too good to be there at once without even doing anything. Truly, he was giftedly remarkable. Passers-by were sneaking glances at him, did flamboyantly obvious double takes, or straight up stared. Mostly the women were the ones staring, but not all of them appreciatively.

He gave no sign that he noticed the curious and suspicious scrutiny of the townspeople, but Jane was somehow certain that he did. She found herself, now, painfully conscious that his discomforts were in no small part an all-encompassing insecurity with every aspect of himself, not arrogance alone or his more simple awkwardness. He was a fish out of water in more ways than just being a stranger in a strange land.

They passed Annie's Diner and its perpetual plywood front, not quite covering the devastation underneath, and Luke stared at it a moment too long, his eyes slightly rounder than usual.

"We had, uh, a tornado," she offered, following his gaze. Technically, that was true. Thor had caused one somehow with his super-hammer. That wasn't what had created this particular damage- she thought it might have been the third time the big scary robot thing had thrown the beardy guy off its back and he went careening through the store fronts- but it wasn't actually a lie.

"The others have been repaired," Luke observed in a near-whisper.

"The owners didn't have insurance, there was only so much time and money around to help out with all the damage, you know. There's a couple places still digging themselves out of the hole."

"I see."

He strode on and she had to jog slightly to catch up. "Not how they do it round your place?"

"The village is the village. It would be the responsibility of everyone, not least the king, to... heal a disaster."

His tone closed the subject and she wondered why he'd gone so white. Maybe a natural disaster had killed his birth mother, the father he had yet to mention. Maybe it was something else entirely. She felt like she was falling into a black hole with this man, either she was about to be spaghettified or she was going to discover the next plane of existence. Either he was crazy or they were about to change the world.

She should probably be afraid, but she wasn't.


	9. Tear

9. Tear

.

The junk shop was most of an old, two-storey hardware store and a fenced in lot behind, both piled high and stuffed to the gills with all kinds of random crap; everything from nineteen-fifties era appliances to auto parts to a working soundboard. She'd once found an old Macintosh II in there and had barely stopped herself from lugging the thing home just for the fun of taking it apart, of trying to make it work again. Organised approximately by wherever there was room when it was brought in, the stock teetered almost to the ceiling in vast, filthy columns, and pretty much anything could eventually be found there if one was willing to look hard enough.

There was more practically useful, modern stuff in a locked side room, significantly less dusty and better lit than the rest of the dingy old place, and replenished mostly by the cast offs of the aerospace research team that operated not far outside of town. Jane had her suspicions that the program director was throwing her a bone where he could, because they'd let go some very workable computers and seismic equipment she'd easily been able to refit for her own purposes.

She grabbed Luke's hand to pull him toward the door and tried not to be offended by his violent flinch as her grasp closed. Apparently she'd just surprised him, as he allowed her to lead him inside and didn't shake off her grip even as they crossed the antique threshold, peeling paint happily rubbing off on Jane's sleeve and not his when she held open the door for him.

He was probably surprised anew when a mound behind the counter that gave every indication of being a heap of old clothes with a baseball cap and newspaper on top shifted and grunted at them as they came in. A wizened face appeared around the paper, "If it isn't my best customer, Dr. Foster. I was beginning to think you'd skipped town on me without saying goodbye. You found out about that freak storm yet? Maria thinks it's an omen, she always does."

Jane smiled fondly as she watched the owner get up, dust off his overalls, and smooth his work-stained hands over his prodigious belly, " 'Fraid not, Lucio. I'll let you know. This is Luke."

"Sir," Luke said, practically dripping civility. Jane bit her lip to keep from giggling.

Lucio eyed him and grunted again, neutrally. "Lookin' for anything in particular, Jane?"

She chattered a bit about hoping to cannibalize a few more of the old aerospace sensor set-ups and hoped Luke would realise that they had never established what he actually needed and step in to offer some additional direction. He followed them into the locked side room, looking like he was struggling to maintain his personal bubble of cleanliness in the cramped and dirty surroundings. When she glanced back and caught his expression of discreet distaste for the entirety of the proceedings, it made her want to laugh out loud. He could be such a little princess.

"You said, Jane," he finally interrupted, his eyes carefully surveying the racks and piles, "that we might build a small vacuum chamber in the laboratory?"

"Yeah, yeah!" she pointed at him enthusiastically, glad he had brought it up because she'd completely forgotten, "Lucio, you have something for me?"

She felt almost giddy with excitement to be building something, readying a practical experiment. There hadn't been any for quite some time, what with her portal-research at a stand still and her data crunching starting over fresh with the insights she'd gathered from Thor. She wasn't certain where they would go from here, but there was no point getting ahead of something that her rational brain was telling her wasn't terribly likely to happen in the first place.

"Got an old pressure washer, could work. She's junk, but with a will and some elbow grease, I figure she still got some fight in her. You got flanges and pumps? I have whole rooms of that kind of thing, they're practically free. You need tubing and pressure readers: I got that, too." He waved them out of the way and pottered into the next room, the sound of shifting rust and clanking parts drifting after him.

"He's quite a salesman, isn't he?" Luke remarked conversationally.

Jane ignored him and followed Lucio's beckoning shouts.

They really should have brought the van.

She refused to feel sorry for Luke and his nice clean clothes and his perfectly put-together, tightly wound, touch-me-not-ness, because it was really his own fault that he had to carry a bunch of filthy, heavy metal. Uncomplaining, though looking offhandedly aggrieved in her direction when he thought she wasn't watching, he bound the big pieces of steel in a complex polyurethane sling that he lifted, one-handed like he was picking up an enormous snotty hanky. He wrinkled his nose at it and slung it reluctantly over his shoulder. The thick tubing and huge copper flanges he had stashed in a canvas bag that dangled from his other hand. She chose not to wonder how much all that stuff had to weigh, because he let show no sign of exertion and she had no problem leaving him to his martyrdom.

Her shoulder bag she filled with bits of old motherboard, some sensors, solder, a giant tangle of various wires, and useful switches. It dug into the skin as she hefted it and she sighed at herself for ever thinking of coming here without the van no matter how much its existence seemed to offend her new partner in crime.

"I would've gone back for the van," she said again. They walked along at the same brisk pace as before, but his burden barely shifted with the motion of his stride. He'd wrapped it with precisely perfect balance.

"So you said, and I informed you then that it was not necessary," he managed to sound exactly as prim as ever. "I assume that you heard me? That perhaps you might even heed me this time?"

Jane grinned to herself as she shifted her bag to the other side, "Oh, absolutely."

"Excellent."

She thought of saying something about pride going before the fall, but decided not to tempt fate. If he tripped because of all that crap he was pretending wasn't- but obviously had to be- excruciatingly heavy it would serve him right, though she had the feeling he would somehow contrive to consider it her fault if she dared to mention it. So she just whistled a cheery tune and ignored the affronted aside glance he sent her way.

..,.,.,.,.,.,..

"Oh good grief, this is heavy," she whimpered, trying to push the now mostly-in-one-piece, more-or-less a vacuum chamber into the corner near the pumps. She really needed to get more physically active, because this was sad. "Luke-"

He'd been hovering pretty closely, holding things in place and lifting heavy objects for her, and swept in to help before she could finish her thought. Sliding the end-table sized chamber into place against the west wall of windows and tightening the connections securely, it all began to look like a coherent design. They glanced at each other over the thing and smiled wearily, before going back to their various piles of bits and bobs.

Luke had watched her setting up computers and making small readers and sensors like an apprentice watching Da Vinci, peering at her quick, capable little fingers as she soldered and screwed and ran wires. She showed him how to crimp connections properly and was vaguely amused by the determined furrow of his brow as he copied her movements. It wasn't exactly rocket science, though she supposed he did have the way about him of someone who'd never had to hold pliers before and he might as well get it right the first time. Watching his fingers in turn, deft and clever in their work, she noticed a healed line across the inside of his left grip; like a callus had once been there.

Forbidding herself from falling into further speculation about his person or history, she reached out to guide his hand when it looked like the solder was in danger of going awry. His shock at her unexpected touches had dwindled to a barely perceptible twitch as the afternoon wore on, but she still felt him move as her fingers curled against his knuckles. She'd say he needed to cut back on caffeine, but he didn't seem to consume any; his jumpiness apparently an all natural feature of being so hopelessly uptight.

Satisfied he was getting the hang of things, Jane left him to it. Finishing with the various tasks she'd set him, he turned back to his own strange components and frowned ferociously at them in a new kind of concentration.

..,.,.,.,.

"Right, so these rings in the chamber are going to function as storage rings and theoretically- if your stuff works the way it should- we'll be able to accelerate two beams today, keep them here all night, and collide them tomorrow in the same device without losing inertia. Thus, making this thing the itty bitty atom-smasher that could." Jane counted off stages on her fingers and only just prevented herself from fidgeting with her hairline as she looked to him for confirmation.

"Correct. We'll create anti-protons in this section, which functions as a proton synchrotron and uses an iridium screen to cause the reaction, the anti-protons being collected in the vacuum chamber synchrotron. Tomorrow, we will create antimatter." He grinned at her triumphantly as he recapped the details, looking lit from within with simmering excitement, and Jane just shook her head.

"Alrighty," she said, beginning to seriously wonder if she hadn't actually caused Darcy to crash the van chasing weirdness in the desert the previous summer and she'd been in a coma all this time. It would make her life a lot easier to understand.

Luke narrowed his eyes at her, somewhat playfully and somewhat dangerously, she thought, "You are not pleased?"

"I'll be pleased when it works." Maybe. It was hard to determine how she would feel, it was too large to properly contemplate. She felt much like she'd been swamped by a big wave and carried away to parts unknown before she'd really realised what had happened. When had this project slid out of her usually vise-tight control?

The grin returned, wickedly crooked, "Not doubting me, are you Jane? Not wise."

"Oh, I don't," she checked over the last of the many hookups for the observational array and wiped her hands on her jeans, "that's what scares me."

He laughed and it was the first time she could remember him ever having done so. A light, tinkling laugh, much more boyish than she would have imagined if she had thought to imagine what it would sound like. It felt like progress, and she found herself smiling at him, feeling like they were heading off on some kind of adventure together. They were bound to discover _something_.

Even if they just discovered that she was ridiculous to expect this to work and he had simply been fundamentally confused about names and concepts.

"So," she ran her hand along the (somewhat haphazard) surface of their Frankenconstruction and checked it over for basic soundness. It wouldn't do to blow up the lab, and while she didn't really see how they'd achieve that with what they'd put together, it felt like a possibility. "No external power."

"Well..." he was rubbing his thumbnail, she couldn't decide if the presence of his nervous tic in this context was a terrible sign or not, "there is an external source, but it... I could not make it clear to you, Jane. You must trust me."

"Okay."

"Okay?"

She wriggled her fingers at him, "That's what I said. Do whatever. I'm ready for something to happen, I'll catch any reaction that goes on with this set-up. If this all falls apart, we're just going back to stellar dynamics 101 next week. We can build a miniature radio telescope. It'll be fun."

Luke looked enchanted by her hyperactive, pre-emptive disappointment blocking and seemed on the cusp of laughing again, "This is an extremely interesting side of you, Jane. I had not thought you would become so ambivalent at the moment of truth. Are you afraid we will fail or afraid we will succeed?"

She did laugh, but it was a bubbling giggle that basically answered his question, "I am so ready for this to work, really. I- for some reason- actually think it will. And I worry about myself for thinking that."

"Just for yourself? Am I beyond saving, then?"

"I can't be worrying about you any more than I already am, sunshine. You are such a problem, I've decided to just completely believe in your sanity and fly into this thing on a wing and a prayer. This is rock of ages cleaving faith, Luke. I'm committed to you knowing what you're doing so hard, because you said you'd bring in imagination and you certainly have and you've certainly proven you can take us new places with it. I've nailed my colours to the mast of innovation, here." She huffed out a breath and tried to stop hyperventilating, "This was supposed to sound more inspiring and less like you've dragged me into a cult."

He smirked at her, amusement sparkling in his eyes- he looked so _thrilled_, "Your confidence is tremendously comforting."

"So is your flippancy... let's- let's do this." Jane pretended she didn't feel like a complete tool for using those words, but Luke, in his tragic ignorance of any and all cliché, didn't even react. She was kind of glad Darcy wasn't around for this, because if Darcy were here, there were so many things about her behaviour that she would never, ever live down.

"Prepare yourself, then," he gestured her toward her station with a haughty flick of his elegant fingers and she noted that the trend of dictatorial hand motions was continuing.

"I am prepared, you have permission to launch."

He raised an eyebrow at that, either because he understood that he was being told off in an incredibly soft, some might say passive-aggressive, manner or because he didn't understand the reference; she wasn't going to quibble.

"All systems go," she added, by way of not clarifying.

Ignoring her- or figuring it out- he turned to the machine and ran his fingers along a line of writing and raised silver material that covered the top of the exotic cylinder part from where it joined to the steel pipe that formed part of the beamline. The noise of the vacuum pumps was the only sound for a long moment, but soon she seemed to hear- perhaps to feel- a hum inside her own head. Her vision blurred slightly, as if the whole room were suddenly subtly oscillating very fast. There was a dim light in the cylinder and for half a breath she thought she saw a purple-green haze form, thin tendrils of dark smoke winding all around the machine like vines. Luke's hand came to rest on the raised lip at the end furthest from the vacuum, just the very tips of his splayed fingers touching it; he stared down at the spot where his flesh met metal, his mouth slightly open and his shoulders noticeably rising and falling with his quick, shallow breathing.

Jane looked to her instruments and felt a numbness creep over her whole body, her arms suddenly heavy and her knees weak. It was working. It was making anti-protons at a rate that should not have been possible. None of it should have been possible: the energy needed, the magnets needed, the coolant needed, nothing of what should have been indispensable was there in any form she recognised. Everything she had ever known about particle physics and the limitations of the technology was melting in on itself.

She'd thought she had been absolutely prepared for this to work, cavalier in her approach to the game-breaking innovation it would comprise because she'd already lived through the most stunning game-changer it was possible to imagine and she'd taken it in stride. She had thought that she genuinely believed Luke when he said he could do this, because he was just off enough from all her experience, just crazily brilliant enough, that it seemed like anything and everything could be within his reach. She knew now that she hadn't believed. Not for a moment- until this instant- did she truly understand and accept the implications, the massively far-reaching madness, that this would actually release. The world had realigned itself and she too had begun walking a path from which there was no turning. Not back, not aside.

For the second time in two years, she felt her mind expand.

She returned her attention to Luke's broad back, his sharp shoulder blades outlined by the taut fabric of his shirt as he held one arm out stiffly at his side and the other toward the device. Her vision narrowed to a pin-prick, all of her awe and uncertainty and wonder concentrated on this person who had needed only a little guidance, some pretty minor professional assistance, to bring science as she knew it to its knees.

_Who __are __you_ _?_

Time seemed to stop; her breathing was deafening, her own heartbeat echoing in her ears. The moment stretched on and on, her equipment buzzing with impossibilities and his stillness like a touchstone around which the world now turned. Then it was suddenly over, the air thinned to a normal density and the afternoon sun that she last remembered streaming in cheerfully at the windows had, in the interim of lost-endless time, darkened to moonlight.

Luke glanced at her over his shoulder and started to say something as he made to turn, instead staggering involuntarily backward and catching himself against the device. Bluish smudges of fatigue marred his fair skin and his eyelids drooped very low. Reacting on an instinct that cut through the paralysis of shock, Jane rushed over to support him and nearly buckled under his weight as he instantly slumped against her. Gritting her teeth, she half-prodded, half-dragged him towards the couch and guided his collapse so that he landed on it more or less comfortably. His body twisted with his feet still on the ground and his inky black hair spreading like an oil slick against the white cushion, it wasn't exactly the picture of his usual dignity.

She lifted his legs onto the couch, though they overshot the end by quite a ways, and tried to shift him off of his arm and onto his back so that he wasn't cutting off the circulation. Her dazed brain was grateful for the mundanity; giving her something to look after, easy to straighten out.

"I didn't realise..." he murmured to her, sounding very sleepy, "I didn't realise I'd been awake so long. It's night."

"Yes," she said. She didn't know what else to say.

He hummed sweetly in response, a high tenor note, "Were we successful?"

"We were."

He smiled tiredly, his eyes already closed, "Did I not promise you, Jane? Did I not promise?"

She straightened his over shirt, pulling it closed again where it had fallen open, and watched as his breathing became slow and deep. Even passed out with exhaustion, there was still tension in his face, some unmet expectation.

"You did," she said, and she stared at his sleeping frown, his sad young face, forever weary with expressing all that vanity and terrible, vicious insecurity. Always awash in his pervading arrogances and inferiorities, an open book of his emotions that told her everything and nothing. A perfectionist and a defeatist, he'd been at once so certain and so despairing of all those things he had fiercely promised her were possible. "You're a man of your word."

She touched a lock of his hair, silky and strange between her fingers, and felt desperately alone.


	10. Mend

10. Mend

.

There was time in the morning. Time for her to sleep through both her regular alarm and her backup alarm. To concede that her trailer was becoming an oven and decide to avoid broiled brains by stumbling out into the blinding mid-morning sun and over to the lab to get cleaned up. To shuffle back to the trailer for the change of clothes she'd forgotten. To have three cups of tea and stare stonily at the observational array as if it were toying with her emotions deliberately.

Time enough for her to notice Erik striding purposefully toward the door and sprint out to catch him before he could come in. To have several entire conversations in heated whispers. About the fact that quiet was necessary because Luke was asleep, what the hell Luke was doing sleeping in the lab, how the laws of physics may not actually apply to all people equally, a disagreement about the nature of an entirely hypothetical anti-matter engine and whether dark energy was a thing that could be harnessed given sufficient understanding, whether they'd been drinking again in Erik's absence, and if there was such a thing as too much sleep. Unable to organise any section of her feelings about the impossible particle accelerator, she'd told her mentor and friend to hold everything for a little while and she would call him. There was too much to process right now for her to also handle moderating the inevitable, and no doubt contentious, discussion the three of them would have when she told him about the experiment.

Erik pretended to be offended that she felt he'd need moderating and, without having had a single thing explained to him, left looking wide-eyed and frazzled. She sympathised.

Plenty of time to head back inside and pull up a plastic chair and creepily watch Luke sleep. It wasn't like she was really _watching him sleep_, it was more that she still couldn't believe he'd done this thing, that _they'd_ done this thing, and she was trying to talk herself out of the crazy loop.

She'd thrown a thick Navajo blanket over him right before she left the night before, the temperature plunging rapidly as the wee hours approached. He had kicked it halfway off, presumably as the warmth of sunrise blazed in through the glass walls, and his lanky limbs were all askew with the fidgeting, making him an even worse fit for the narrow couch than he had been. His head was thrown back and his under shirt was stretched out by some rolling-over tangle, exposing the long, graceful line of his pale throat like a marble column. Jane chewed her thumbnail and felt like she should cover the vulnerable area even as she wrestled with an absurd urge to calculate the slope of it. To graph him until he shrank to fathomable proportions, attempt to grok him in safety while his intimidating and distracting personality was shuttered behind his eyelids.

It was when she was making her fourth cup of tea that he woke. Suddenly. Jumping directly from coma to ramming speed, he'd blinked once and then shot up in a state of full alertness, casing the room with his eyes and looking a little like an alarmed meerkat.

She poured more hot water and stalked over to place a cup on the coffee table near his hand. "Good morning," she murmured, neutrally.

"Jane," he said. He blinked again and the tension in his shoulders dialled down a notch.

"That's tea for you," she pointed to the cup, "I have a clean set of clothes Erik keeps here and there's a shower just in there. You know how to work a stall shower?"

He frowned at her, whether at her distant tone or her questioning of his ability to bathe himself, she didn't know. She wasn't paying attention to him anyway, instead she retrieved a t-shirt, jeans, and a belt from the last drawer of her filing cabinet. When she piled them in front of him he wrinkled his nose and looked like he very much wanted to tell her exactly where to shove them, but he closed his eyes and swallowed and didn't say anything.

"You're about the same height and there's a belt. It'll do. So go shower. Absolutely no further science or conversation until after. I have this intuition that you are not a morning person and I am being thoughtful." She also had a certainty that he was very particular about his person and wouldn't dream of being smelly or walking around in an outfit he'd slept in, so it was definitely that she was being thoughtful and not that she desperately needed him to shut himself up out of her sight for a few minutes.

He was savaging her with eyebrow sarcasm, but he stood and strode aloofly past her, carrying himself with such kingly dignity that he seemed to fill up and dwarf the entire lab with his presence. Not that he'd really needed to go out of his way to make her feel little. Despite the fact that he was in stocking feet and she was in her desert boots, the top of her head didn't quite come up to his clavicle. Looming deliberately to remind her of it was just rude.

"Do," he was muttering darkly, "One does not merely _do_."

Jane watched him until the bathroom door slammed shut, then she turned back to her equipment and thought again about the ends of the universe and the fact that she'd walked beside literal living legends. Cooked breakfast with one. She thought about Luke's piercing gaze and his barely hidden desperation. His volatile moods and contrary stillness.

He'd done this. He'd do more. With her continued help and guidance, as well as her practical knowledge of the applicable technology and skill for cutting corners, who knew what the limits of his genius might be? If there were any. What was her biggest responsibility here? Getting the accelerator out to the world, studied and broken down the moment it was humanly possible to do so, or seizing this amazingness with all her strength and holding on until she found out everywhere it could lead? Her choice, no matter the cost, had always been to hold on to discovery until the absolute bitterest end- until she couldn't hold on any more. She'd met this kind of dilemma before and she knew that nothing had changed. This was her baby, her life, the stuff dreams were made on: no one was going to take it away from her this time.

The world could wait until she found out how deep the rabbit hole went, because there'd be no going back if she went public. No peaceful continuation of the project on their terms, probably no further pursuit at all until the accelerator was fully understood and the circus around it died down. How could that be the right thing? It wasn't like she owed the formal academic community for much, it certainly wasn't like she could summon up enough scraps of loyalty to feel like she had to report to SHIELD before she even knew what she was dealing with. Not when she wasn't at all assured that they wouldn't snatch it all out of her hands again, bury it, and tell her it was for the best. She might be giving up an opportunity for all mankind if she faltered in her step at this crucial moment.

She felt like Neil Armstrong going down a ladder.

Luke emerged from the bathroom looking tetchy and out of sorts. His wet hair, loose and tucked behind his ears, was actually much longer than it had appeared to be in its usual style, the ends just brushing his shoulders and leaving a damp ring on the collar of his too-big t-shirt. Erik had been getting a bit sensitive about his spare tire lately and a forgiving double XL was just a bit more coverage than Luke's trim torso required; the neck gaped and the uneven hanging of the hem almost managed to camouflage the fact that he'd had to cinch the jeans way in with the belt to keep them from sliding off his slim hips. A flash of pale skin was visible as he lifted a hand to sip the tea he'd taken with him. He looked like a damn teenager, this scientific revolutionary, all sharp angles and loose fabric.

She stared at him a moment, her daze not dissipated by his brief absence. She bit her lip nervously and patted the couch beside her.

He watched her hand distrustfully and could have been all of seventeen between the petulant frown on his face and his baggy outfit rendering him smaller and messier and more human. She had almost opened her mouth to say something stupid before he stalked over and sat down, taking that strange not quite camp fire-style pose with his ankles crossed on the floor. He seemed dreadfully out of place and somehow woefully under-dressed, even though he was appropriately clothed for her kind of lab environment for the first time. His eyes met hers clearly and expectantly as ever, an unnervingly vivid, swirling aqua in the mid-morning light. Like Earth from space.

Jane sipped her tea and then forced herself to put it down when she realised she was getting mad jittery and the last thing she needed was any more caffeine.

"So yesterday, what we did- what mostly you did, really- do you, you know, actually understand how big of a deal that was?" she ran her hand through her hair and scratched nervously at her scalp, tucking away the unwelcome thought that she'd probably rub herself bald with the habit at the rate she was going.

He quirked an eyebrow at her, but he was still sort of frowning, "I understand that your empiric technical knowledge and my innovation allowed us to overcome an obstacle in our path. I had thought precisely that quality of complementary synergy was the reason we were working together."

Her fingers got tangled in her hair and she yanked them out impatiently, wincing briefly as a few hairs came with them, "Luke, your mystery material that you couldn't explain to me has broken the scientific glass ceiling. All of particle physics might be rewritten because of what that machine that we built- in one day- can do."

Luke shrugged a little, but there was a gleam of self-satisfaction in his expression and he managed to smirk without moving his face. "My concern is our research, the device allows us to move forward. What you do with it after we have investigated this avenue is not of interest to me."

"Have you heard of an organisation called SHIELD?" Her heart was loud in her ears and she half expected that this day would end with both of them locked up in some super-secret bunker three miles underground, but whatever. As weird as Luke acted, as mysterious as he continued to be, she could no longer kid herself that she wasn't going to trust him with the whole of her research. She had to, she had to give him absolutely anything he could use because _look what he could do with just a little help_.

And damn it, she liked him. He made it kind of hard and kind of way too easy, and she wanted to find out what his deal was more every time he seemed offended or bewildered by her interest. There was shit buried in that yard. Bones.

Politely ignoring her subtle panic attack, he squinted at her speculatively and tapped his index finger against his mouth, prompting her to wonder if he was going to drop a bombshell on the conversation. Finally, he just tilted his head and said, "It does sound familiar."

"That's it?" she touched his leg in hopes of grounding him on her side and he stared at her hand like she'd put it somewhere way less innocent than his kneecap; she patted him again anyway, "Nothing else to say?"

"I have heard of them, but I know nothing more than that they are organised and apparently well-funded, interest themselves in the unusual, and likely know much that they keep from your people." He tucked his feet to the side, pulling further away but pointing his knees towards her, "You suspected that they sent me? That's what all your reservation has been based upon?"

"Not all of it, but yeah. I've dealt with them before. I'm still... dealing with them. Look," and she did look at him, and he looked back with more of that terrifying focus. He so had some idea of what was coming, she was sure of it. Somehow, she still wanted to trust him; he was so shady and she just wanted to trust him anyway so badly. She had faith in him. "Last summer, right, I'd been observing this predictable stellar weirdness and I was getting really excited about it, so I called in Erik. And..."

There was an incredibly long silence and he just looked at her steadily, waiting. She shook her head and his lips twitched in a soft, reflexive smile that she had no clue how to interpret. "Dr. Selvig is very important to you, your academic mentor, but it's more than that isn't it? Your father's friend and colleague, your guardian. Did you ask him to confirm your discovery because of his greater experience or because his acquiescence would also be approval, would also be pride?

"And yet you shared a discovery of tremendous importance with me this past evening and did not then inform him of it. You thought perhaps today you would finally tell me what you have been working on recently, but he does not wish it and you are hesitant. I suppose, Jane, that you must decide which judgement is the one you most trust. His or yours." He leaned forward and there was some profound knowledge in the gaze that met hers, compassion in the fingers that trailed lightly over her hand where it rested on the cushion between them. "I've told you before that I believe in your instincts. I will listen if you wish to speak, I will not abandon our work together if you wish to be silent.

"I have no desire to punish you for loyalty. I understand its power."

She felt cold and nervous, the weight of indecision increasing and pulling her down. It would no longer be _his_ sanity they'd be worrying about if she went through with this. "Well, is he right?"

Luke cocked his head.

"To tell me not to trust you."

He smiled, but it was small and broken and his eyes were shimmering slightly. Something _wrong_ twisted itself through his expression, some crack in his cool beauty grew a little wider and hidden horror started to show; a strange spike of anger and bitter humour and hurt worming through the thoughtful look he was trying to affect. There was something very bleak about his honesty when he said, "Most likely."

"Then I trust you."

He scowled at her in something like outrage, though it wasn't really confusion or shock, "Of all the...! Why? I've just..."

She interrupted with a hand gesture as he was so fond of doing himself, "I'm contrary."

The giggle this startled out of him was a tiny bit hysterical, his grin a rictus, "I do lie, you know."

"Everyone does," she allowed easily, not reacting when this pronouncement provoked a very strange look, "Have you lied to me?"

"Not... particularly." He seemed mildly annoyed by the admission.

"Sounds legit." Jane smiled and shook her head at him. She wondered if he realised it was his deliberation that sold her, that he had to think about whether Erik's concerns were justified or not. His motives weren't simple, whatever they were, and she would have been hard pressed to believe a simple yes or a simple no. The fact that he was a somehow dangerous person was not new information and wouldn't have been shocking if it were, and she was almost insulted he felt like he had to warn her that he was manipulative. Like she hadn't noticed. "You want to grab a snack?"

His lip curled up slightly as he leaned away from her, "I have found your concept of appropriate sustenance somewhat lacking."

Deflecting. She rolled her eyes and started to rise to get something anyway. She was hungry. "Excuse me, Your Highness."

His fingers twitched, but for once he had no rejoinder.

"There's a toaster strudel in that freezer with my name on it. Then we'll talk. I think you know about what, though I hope you don't know too much or I'm going to have an MIB poking around here making things difficult." She pushed her terrible breakfast into the toaster and leaned on the counter, suddenly giggling to herself. "Other than you, I mean. You can see why our brains went there."

Luke, not having moved from the couch, stared at the coffee table with a look of blanket annoyance and crossed his arms. "I have not the faintest notion what you are babbling about."

"No cinema in Swaziland?" it was half a tease and half an actual question.

He made a confirming noise in the back of throat, "For me, no, I would have had to cross the border to South Africa. What is it about seeing the same production of a play over and over again that your people find so appealing?"

Jane paused, never having given it any thought. She shrugged, "If you like something, why wouldn't you want to experience it again? It's like re-reading a book. There's always something new because you're not exactly the same as the first time you read it. Your mood or stuff you've learned, whatever, it changes things. I'm not the biggest movie person, but I'm sure there's lots of reasons."

"I could never have imagined so many ways to waste time as are in this room alone," he gazed around, looking a little helpless. "Is not life brief enough for you?"

She groaned and shook her head, "It doesn't feel brief if you never have any fun. Honestly, lighten up."

The toaster dinged and she focussed on smearing icing on her strudel, coming over to throw herself back on the couch when the little pastries were thoroughly saturated. She sighed in contentment as she took her first bite.

"If you find that delicious, I truly pity you," Luke commented, folding his hands over his flat stomach.

"Snob."

"If that means that I have standards for what I will eat, then certainly."

Jane giggled and thought the word applied to him more broadly than that, "You haven't even tried it."

"I have tried sufficient foodstuffs from frozen paper boxes to know that they are all unsuitable for consumption. Which was one." He lifted his foot to rest his ankle across the opposite knee, his toes tapping against the air. "You require a cook, Jane. Your diet is unwholesome."

Torn between laughing, outrage, and being oddly touched, she just shook her head.

"Are you going to tell me what you began to tell me earlier sometime before you drop dead of malnutrition?" his wry tone was slightly strained, his raised eyebrow more questioning than sardonic.

"Erik flew out and we drove into the desert to view the phenomena I'd been observing," she blurted, trying to outpace her doubts, "but it had changed. It was lit up like the Northern Lights. There was stratocumulus suddenly everywhere, a clear sky filled in moments, and this swirling electrical storm. We chased it to investigate and..."

Frozen and pale with apparent shock, Luke stared at her for what felt like hours before whispering, "And?"

"And someone was inside."


	11. Rush

11. Rush

.

Luke listened raptly as she cautiously and stutteringly elaborated on her little pronouncement. He was hanging on her every word, silent and tense as a bowstring; she could have counted all the tendons in his hands, his neck. As if the fate of worlds depended on her story, his eyes seemed to will her to speak faster and faster, to finish at once and to go on forever.

Jane told him about the strange man who had materialised out of the desert, how he'd been babbling and disorientated and they had assumed he must be drunk. She told him about the unexplained markings and runes in the sand that she had been unable to interpret, the sudden appearance of which had so flabbergasted her that she didn't even ping to how profoundly not kosher it was that an astronomical phenomenon had left intelligible symbols in the dirt until some time later. She told him about a shadow on a spectrograph that looked like a person falling and an escaped patient built like a tank whose every utterance was worryingly odd. Words failed her then and she fell silent, watching him and waiting for the hammer to fall.

His throat worked as he swallowed thickly, then he closed his eyes and breathed deeply like he was trying to get a hold of himself. Nothing came. Concentration alone prevented her from hyperventilating.

"He was from another world," she said, plunging ahead through the last shred of her plausible deniability. "Another planet, another dimension- _somewhere else_. He came through the wormhole. SHIELD jumped in to try to cover it all up, stole everything I owned, but I wasn't going to lay down and die just because they wear black suits and say they're the good guys. He helped me, the traveller, he got me back enough of my notes to go on with my work. In the end, after he left, they seemed to decide I was the nearest thing to an expert on the Einstein-Rosen bridge phenomenon in the world and they've been funding me ever since. There you go."

Luke burst back into motion like he'd been freed from a spell, swooping forward to grab her hand so quickly that she startled at his touch. He lifted her fingers to his lips and pressed a dry kiss just below her knuckles. His grip on her palm and wrist was so tight that it was hurting her, but she couldn't pull away. His eyes shone as they met hers and he shook his head helplessly. "Thank-you, Jane."

She was completely lost, her stomach was still doing terrified little flips. "Thank-you?"

He smiled at her with an aching sweetness she couldn't fathom, "For trusting me."

Momentarily so gobsmacked that she couldn't react at all, she instead back-tracked over her own story and made a mental list of the many, many sapient details which she had left out. The billions of questions that she would have had for anyone telling her something even a tenth as insane as what she had just told him- provided, of course, she was at all prepared to entertain the idea that they weren't just full-on frothing with lunacy. She looked up at him, his face lit with some prodigious emotion and his hands still holding hers. "You believe me? Just like that?"

"Should I not believe you?" Luke was regaining his composure now, leaning back into the couch with something approaching the calm arrogance he affected when he thought he was in control of the conversation. Something had shifted in the balance between them, but Jane wasn't quite wrong-footed enough to let him get away with whatever he thought he was getting away with.

"No, you definitely should, because I am telling you the truth. I just find it a bit surprising how... you're taking it pretty in stride for something..." She was being non-confrontational, but there were questions and suspicions that she'd been suppressing for a dangerously long time at this point, and critical mass could very well be imminent. "You're taking aliens in stride. And yesterday you did the impossible using massive amounts of energy from thin air. I think I've been pretty patient and forgiving about it so far, but I really think you should tell me who you are now."

Jane released her breath and prayed this wouldn't be the end of the project. She had not yet been able to change her messed up priorities.

Luke's face had gone blank as he studied her, but he didn't seem overly offended or intimidated by the question. His eyes slid sideways and he dropped his head to lean against his fist, a crooked elbow braced on the back of the couch: a posture of thorough contemplation, entirely directed at her. His hair, curling upward from the ends as it dried, fell forward and conveniently shaded his expression from close scrutiny, but she could still see him chewing the inside of his lip and was certain it meant his thoughts were racing behind the cool façade.

"My father lied to me all my life," he announced with chilling tonelessness, glancing at her with an intent but vacant look that transformed his lovely, youthful face into a desolate mask.

Her mouth opened to ask questions even as the breath to form them left her body.

"My- my-" he choked on his words, strangling in the grip of some fierce grief and his mouth twisting with horrible bitterness, "my _adopted_ father. One might perhaps call him, more punctiliously, my kidnapper."

"How old were you?" Jane's mind spun, much bigger questions too numerous to force into words clattering around in her brain. It was typical that the most mundane objection made it out first. She was running back over the things he had told her and was coming up with a few other equations that wouldn't balance. At all costs, she must keep him talking. He was being candid again, writhing in discomfort all the while, and she would use it to get this ridiculous situation under control. She would be where she belonged in the driver's seat of this magical mystery tour, even if she had to lose all grip on Earth logic to get there.

"I know that I told you..." he read her mind, "I made it sound..."

"Which parents were killed?" she tried to actually feel as crisp and collected as her voice sounded, "More keep popping up."

"All of them, they're all dead," his acerbity was ugly, his usually smooth voice ragged and guttural. "One way or the other."

She got the impression that they weren't talking strictly literal death in all cases.

Her silence in the face of this high melodrama seemed to eat away at what was left of his equilibrium and he watched her like a field mouse watches an owl. She wasn't sure what the least preposterous course of action would be at this particular juncture, wasn't at all sure of how she should take the turn of the subject to his troubled youth. Whether it might be construed as a tenuous step in the right direction. She wished Darcy were there. Darcy's wasn't necessarily the most 'normal' point of view, but she was aggressively practical and Jane occasionally found it a useful reference to know what a sensible person would do in her place. She sighed and Luke frowned, clearly thinking it was directed at him.

"I am a refugee, Jane," he said at length. It was both a legitimately painful truth and an attempt to get one over on her- she could see it all on his face. "That's who I am."

She took a calming breath and instructed herself to recall that patience was a virtue she'd long been intending to cultivate. "That kind of answer is really not going to cut it this time."

"I was scavenged by my father as a child, plucked up from the conquered ruins of my blood kin and led to believe I belonged truly to my saviours when I was young enough to be thoroughly convinced. They were the elite and the highest authority in their domain, they gave me status, brought me up in their ways, educated me in much not known to your people. I was not told what I was. I most wretchedly _discovered_. It is perfectly true what I said to you before, I know nothing for certain of what their purposes were and now I never shall. I cannot give you a more satisfactory answer, because I do not know of one."

What the hell was she supposed to make of a line like that? She'd had Thor, God of Thunder, eating her stash of Pop-Tarts and clandestine, secret-technology-having SHIELD field agents stealing her research; both entities had been more or less telling the truth when they were at their most vague and crazy. How was she ever supposed to make a reasonable decision about who to take at their word ever again? Who the hell was he even talking about: who were his biological parents and who were the ones who'd adopted him, and had one set killed the other- was he still saying this was an Africa thing or was this finally an admission that there was more to it than that? Did she want to know? Well, of course she wanted to know, but did she have to know so badly that it was worth digging herself even deeper into whatever his deal was?

_Right, because there was ever a chance you were going to let him go without getting into his head. Why do you lie to yourself, Jane, you are a terrible liar._

"Look, I'm not going to ask you to tell me everything straight out, coming from my side of the room that would be a little bit rich. But there is a certain level of candour that I'm gonna need and..." she took a second to count to ten. "Luke, are you in any sense super or non-human?"

There. It was out in the world now, her wildest and most staggeringly unlikely suspicion. The one that had fluttered up into her consciousness in the tiniest, most fleeting wisps at the oddest times, and which she had pointedly discarded entirely. It always, even in the circus her life had turned into, seemed the least plausible option to explain any given thing and she had been trying to hold onto the slippery slope that was her logical reasoning ability.

Luke's gaze froze on her a moment, his surprise that she'd said it flat-out briefly evident, then his eyes darted around the room and she observed his muscles tense as if anticipating the need for a swift reaction. He focussed on her again and smiled tightly, but the crinkles around his eyes portended that some genuine amusement was bleeding through the tension and she didn't know how to feel about that.

"If I said I were, would you be able to contain the questions you would inevitably have? For the sake of knowledge?"

Well, that was a non-answer. She raised an eyebrow at him, "It is a lot to ask."

He nodded.

"I'm not totally without self-control, you know." She felt hard done by. She had been perfectly able to prevent herself from harassing Thor for every single detail of Asgardian cosmology he had ever been exposed to even after he had whetted her appetite by explaining the World's Tree. Though she had to admit that she regretted it and would never have held back if she'd realised he'd be gone before she got another chance.

"That may be so, but given that evidence has generally been inclined otherwise, I'm confident you will forgive me if there is some doubt." He was reading her mind again. He knew she was admitting it in her head.

Jane was sure she was pulling a weird face, but she couldn't tell if he was deliberately teasing her or not. He could be genuinely, _politely_ matter-of-fact to the point of astounding obtuseness and he could be sarcastic with such a precise, razor-sharp edge of dryness that he could have split an atom with a well-chosen word. The difference between the two was a slight smirk hidden in his right eyebrow. She couldn't always tell. That was what made it irritating.

"Luke, if you swear to me that you will eventually tell me absolutely everything there is no compelling reason for me not to know, then I can promise to hold back until you're ready. Those are reasons that _I_ would find compelling. And you have to promise me that'll you'll always share your science knowledge. That can't be off limits."

"I did not say that I met either criterion, Jane. It was a hypothetical question."

She crossed her arms and stared him down, totally unimpressed. "Oh, so you're not?"

"I have not said."

"Unless you're Swaziland's own bigger, better answer to Tony Stark and your village is aware of its own branch of physics, I think you've kind of given the game away with whatever that stuff is you put in our device. A hypothesis of quantum consciousness and the theoretical abstract mind's real interactions with matter is not an explanation for what that thing did even if it were provable." Her thoughts started to drift along that track, trying again to put the pieces of his badly inadequate attempts to explain it to her together with something familiar enough for her to recognise the mechanism. The substance he'd brought, the properties it would have to have to behave as a replacement for so many integral components of the atom-smasher. It was too nebulous, and the dark fringes of quantum mechanics were hardly her area; she packed it away for later. She had to stay on target.

He was waiting patiently for her attention to come back to him. When it did, he picked up where she had left off, "Yet you have reservations about your assumption, you still think perhaps it is possible that I am with a foreign government."

"I always seem to have some reservations. Not that it usually stops me."

Luke snickered and then grinned at her, apparently charmed. "You are very fascinating to me, Jane Foster."

"Feeling's mutual," she muttered, utterly unselfconscious at this point in the tortured jumble of the conversation.

"How do you contrive to think so deeply about everything and remain so impetuous?"

Jane snorted in derision, "I don't know. Have you ever asked a mirror that? You could tell me."

He went still for a long moment and she felt the hairs on the back of her neck lift. His eyes flicked over to her, "How astute," he said, almost at a whisper.

"Used to reading and not being read, are we?" Jane guessed, pleased with the look of mild disconcertion on his face. He was so expressive, but still such a mystery. His heart on his sleeve when it came to his emotions and an enigma machine when it came to his thoughts.

Luke just looked at her with burning eyes and she knew she'd guessed right for the second time that day. She had a gratifying inkling that she had put him off his game. He dragged a hand through his long hair and his slim fingers snagging in the curls seemed to give him momentary pause, as if he'd forgotten it wasn't glued into submission as usual. Jane wondered if he'd ever allowed it free reign in public on purpose before and added an item to the list of things that weren't going his way in this encounter.

"Jane…" he changed tack, his voice gentle and silky with intimacy, "I sought you out and came to you because… at first it was simply because I needed an occupation. A goal. I came to you, knowing who you were, knowing you were the only person- the only connection of which I knew, the only lead toward something in which I could invest my powers and expect a challenge. There is nowhere else for me in this world or in any other: I entirely meant that and I am not at all fond of how often you have forced me to reaffirm it. It is, in fact, one of the more wholly honest and wholly unpleasant things I have ever said, in all shades of truth. And I said it to you, Jane, because there was nothing left for me to begrudge and I profoundly desired that you feel obligated to indulge me. I was not, at that moment, in a position to suffer your rejection, so I offered up the lamentable truth in hopes you would sense its gravity and not deny it."

"One of the most honest things you've ever said. Not just literally true but, I don't know, metaphorically true, as well. Like, it actually meant what it sounded like, right? As opposed to the literal truth that you use to make it sound like something else. I am familiar." Jane was _quite_ familiar, she had secured multiple research grants in her time after all. "And your big moment of honesty was so you could manipulate me into giving you what you wanted. Are you painting this picture of yourself so I'll feel sorry for you and stop asking questions about your background?"

His mouth hung open and it was like his face couldn't decide between rage and shock. Finally, he threw himself to his feet and paced quickly away from her with his hands clasped tightly behind his back.

_Either you're wrong and it hit a nerve or he really doesn't appreciate you catching on. I have no idea which._

"I hadn't planned to paint any image for any benefit," Luke whisper-shouted to the wall in front of him. "I was being candid."

He was clenching his fists, one around the other, and she could see the bunching of muscles all the way up his arms. There was another thing that didn't quite fit and had bothered her before. It struck her that he was, though lean and graceful, very solidly built for a lonely intellectual type. She knew already that he was shockingly strong. She couldn't exactly imagine him pumping iron, like ever, putting aside that weights made bulgy, showy muscles, not long, even ones. He'd looked slender and dangerously sophisticated dressed to the nines in his suits, but now that his arms were bare she could see they were actually deeply carved by oft-used practical strength and that the skin was variously scarred; it seemed, therefore, ever more reasonable to assume that he was more than one breed of dangerous. Questions and questions and no answers.

"I am weary of acting at present."

"Me too," she rubbed the bridge of her nose and tried to tell herself she wasn't having any fun chasing him around verbal corners and picking apart his contradictions.

He crossed his arms over his chest and squinted at her, "Do you realise, Jane Foster, that I have personally disclosed to you more about myself than I have ever willingly allowed any but kin to know? You are insidious, creeping curiously beneath my wariness."

Now that was very sad. He'd told her practically nothing.

He smiled coyly at her look, "Facts are not everything, Doctor."

"No," she agreed, feeling drained, "but some of them are pretty important. I need to know _for a fact_ that you're working for- with- me, and just me. Do I know that? I can't tell any more. Have you been trained to fight, by the way?"

"Of course. What is the significance?"

Jane blinked. He seemed really puzzled. Suddenly, she actually felt better. "I guess nothing."

Bemused, he shook his head at her. She'd distracted him from his anger without even meaning to (again), because his arms loosened and then fell to his sides as he tried to work her out. "I have no ties, Jane. This project, you: these are the only things that matter to me. You will know if that should change. I venture a prediction that you shall know immediately."

"Oh, that's not ominous at all." Jane rolled her eyes.

Called on being a drama queen, he looked a tiny bit embarrassed. "I did not so intend."

"Well, you know, I said I'd trust you. That doesn't mean I always believe you, but it does mean I have to take your basically honourable intentions on faith. So I guess you've decided to make it hard for me." She picked up her plate, brushing strudel crumbs from the coffee table, and walked past him into the kitchen area to wash it. "You will explain your mojo to me. It's a question of when."

"Is it, indeed?" he didn't sound impressed by her order.

She shot him a look over her shoulder, "Yeah. You owe me. You owe me big."

"I have propelled you forward generations in your research."

"You did that for yourself as much as for me. Anyway, not enough. I'm holding back a third degree I have a perfect right to and you know exactly how much that sucks for me, because you're just as nosy as I am."

He had strolled up behind her, silent as a cat, and he peered over her shoulder at what she was doing. "I can't apologise for pointing out that I conceal that trait far more successfully than you do."

"Because it's a wild understatement?" she suppressed a shiver of surprise as his shirt brushed against her back. He was crowding her a little and she fancied she could sense his body heat. "Fair enough. But I still see through you."

"It seems you do, yes," his mouth was just above her ear as he spoke and she practically felt the hum of his low murmur reverberating through his chest. He drifted away, laying hands on the atom smasher and seeming to become instantly absorbed in it.

_You're a prickly, cocky mutant-alien-supergenius-test tube baby and you're full of shit; stop being tragic and mysterious so I can get properly pissed at you._

"So, antimatter today?" she followed him and would have deliberately copied his rubber-necking stance at the sink if she could've stretched tall enough to see anything over his shoulder. She came around his side instead and watched the scratchings on his special components glow slightly as he touched them. "What does all that say, anyway? I don't recognise the language."

"I wrote the purposes for which every piece must channel energy. To keep direction clear and conserve effort," he motioned her out of the way as he circled to the other side of the device, totally ignoring her hint. "The beams have lost no velocity and the machine is prepared to function as a collider. We may complete the experiment whenever you are ready."

That reminded her. She really had to call Erik and tell him... something. Something that made it sound like this was okay and totally a reasonable working relationship to pursue. After antimatter. Then she would call him.

In for a penny...


End file.
